LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMATIONS: COMPARING LAND COVER MAPS TO UNDERSTAND TRENDS AND CHANGES.

We present here a case study on land-use/land cover changes concerning the territory of Borgo Tossignano (Emilia-Romagna region, Italy) The territory in question, extending over 2900 ha between 100 m and 500 m a.s.l., is of particular interest because of its location close both to the plain and to the mountain belt. This implicates the contemporary presence of different patterns of landscape dynamics in a territory of relatively small dimensions. By means of a Geographic Information System we analysed the modifications of land-use/land cover changes over the period 1955-1976-1994-2003, using four geo-referenced land-use maps at 1:25.000 scale. Nine land use categories were distinguished: urban areas, sown areas with cultivated trees, herbaceous crops, orchards and vineyards, shrublands, woodlands, barren soils and non cultivated areas, water bodies, wetlands. Land-use transformations were classified as: persistence, urban persistence, intensification, urban intensification, extensification, exceptionality, natural dynamics, abandonment. The different dynamics considered are reciprocally quite balanced over the period 1955-1976, where persistence (30% of the territory), intensification (22%), abandonment (21%) and natural dynamics (9%) are the most important dynamic tendencies. Subsequently (1976-1994 and 1994-2003) the landscape is primarily characterised by persistence (53% and 55% of the territory in the two periods, respectively), followed by intensification (20% and 16%) and abandonment (10% and 16%), while extensification (9% and 4%) and natural dynamics (5% and 6%) play a less important role. Persistence concerns anthropized areas (herbaceous crops, orchards and vineyards) as well as more natural areas (barren soils and non cultivated areas, shrublands, woodlands). Intensification maintains more or less the same quantitative importance over the whole period. This phenomenon prevalently concerns the transformation of areas belonging to different categories of land use (cultivated and non cultivated) into orchards and vineyards. Abandonment is the third dynamic tendency in order of quantitative importance; it concerns many categories of land use and is not easy to set within a prevailing trend. Intensification as well as abandonment are accompanied by "swap" phenomena, widely distributed throughout the territory Two opposite landscapes (anthropic and semi-natural) co-exist in the studied territory, as in many European countries (Romero-Calcerrada and Perry, 2004; Falcucci et al., 2006; Mottet et al., 2006). "Swap" phenomena cause space-temporal variability in the anthropic landscape deriving from intensification as well as in the semi-natural landscape deriving from abandonment.