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Figura 5 – Human population changes from 1960 to 1990 and from 1990 and 2000.
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of woods (Fagus sylvatica, Quercus cerris and other broadleaves, Abies alba and other conifers).
In particular, an important part of the Foreste Casentinesi National Park woods became of mature
age classes (>80 years); this trend, combined with the retention of dead and dying trees,
indicates that the ecological functionality of these forests and woods is potentially fully retained.
Obviously, we cannot extrapolate these results to the entire study area, since the Foreste Casentinesi
National Park is just a small area in the Apennines (36,000 ha) but there is, at least, an
indication of the ecological trends in the land-use/land-cover change that we measured.
Similar patterns of land-use/land-cover change have already been found in other parts of the
world, but usually for areas much smaller than the Italian peninsula (Farina 1991; Ales et al. 1992;
Garcia-Ruiz et al. 1996; Preiss et al. 1997; Debussche et al. 1999; Olsson et al. 2000; Robinson &
Sutherland 2002; Brown et al. 2005). The consequences for biodiversity have been discussed
(Alkorta et al. 2003; Dale et al. 2005; Hansen et al. 2005; Huston 2005), and several studies have
suggested that a reduction of human population density in agricultural regions can produce
indirect environmental benefits (Huston 2005), with abandonment of marginal agricultural lands
(both for cultivation and for pasture) and substantial forest regeneration. Moreover, it has been
suggested that an increase in intensive agriculture can potentially reduce the ecological footprint
related to food production allowing for the preservation of less productive lands (Huston 2005).
We argue that these considerations cannot be considered to hold for Italy and for the Mediterranean
basin in general, where the integration among biodiversity and traditional human activities
is much tighter than in the North American context (Farina et al. 2003; Foster et al. 2003).
In the Mediterranean, agricultural intensification has led to a widespread decline of farmland biodiversity
for many taxa (Matson et al. 1997; Preiss et al. 1997; Lavorel et al. 1998; Donald et al.
2001; Benton et al. 2003), cessation of pasture grazing and increased reforestation have reduced
the availability of habitats for many species, and an increase in the size of cities has led to
large ecological footprints (Rees 1997).
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