PREMESSA E INQUADRAMENTO DEL TEMA DI STUDIO (INTRODUCTION TO THE RESEARCH ISSUE)

After the Second World War up to now the realization of new infrastructures and new polycentric developments have caused significant alterations in rural landscape. Rural areas -under the pressure of urban sprawl- are nevertheless often still rich in ecological, landscape and cultural matrices, forming the connective tissue of the whole system. Moreover, countryside is to some extent loosing its traditional value for agroforestry productions and gaining more and more value for re-establishing and completing ecological networks, which have the potential to generate new productive chains and to promote the achievement of high-quality standards in agricultural productions. This brought increasingly to the fore the importance of describing and assessing changes in rural land-use and landscape, investigating the major driving forces contributing to land-use change, and outlining future scenarios, through integrated analyses. The study presented in this book arose from the above-outlined framework, and was carried out by authors belonging to the University of Bologna, the University of Molise and the University of Marches. The research groups agreed on a research architecture aimed at investigating different and complementary issues of landscape change, and at verifying and comparing various methodologies and approaches through their test in different contexts. Nevertheless, since landscape change assessment is a very broad theme that calls for the consideration of the complex and manifold relations between the trends of the various natural and anthropic features, as well as the in-depth study of cultural issues, the research examined the part of the whole theme connected to the specific skills of the research groups.