SPATIAL ANALYSES AND REMOTE SENSING FOR LAND COVER CHANGE DYNAMICS: ASSESSING IN A SPATIAL PLANNING

ABSTRACT (EN) Spatial planning is a crucial discipline for the identification and implementation of sustainable development strategies that take into account the environmental impacts on the soil. In recent years, the significant development of technology, like remote sensing and GIS software, has significantly increased the understanding of environmental components, highlighting their peculiarities and criticalities. Geographically referenced information on environmental and socio-economic components represents a fundamental database for identifying and monitoring vulnerable areas, also distinguishing different levels of vulnerability. This is even more relevant considering the increasingly significant impact of land transformation processes, consisting of rapid and frequent changes in land use patterns. In order to achieve some of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda, the role of environmental planning is crucial in addressing spatial problems, such as agricultural land abandonment and land take, which cause negative impacts on ecosystems. Remote sensing, and in general all Earth Observation techniques, play a key role in achieving SDG 11.3 and 15.3 of Agenda 2030. Through a series of applications and investigations in different areas of Basilicata, it has been demonstrated how the extensive use of remote sensing and spatial analysis in a GIS environment provide a substantial contribution to the results of the SDGs, enabling an informed decisionmaking process and enabling monitoring of the results expected, ensuring data reliability and directly contributing to the calculation of SDG objectives and indicators by facilitating local administrations approaches to work in different development and sustainability sectors. In this thesis have been analyse the dynamics of land transformation in terms of land take and soil erosion in sample areas of the Basilicata Region, which represents an interesting case example for the study of land use land cover change (LULCC). The socio-demographic evolutionary trends and the study of marginality and territorial fragility are fundamental aspects in the context of territorial planning, since they are important drivers of the LULCC and territorial transformation processes. In fact, in Basilicata, settlement dynamics over the years have occurred in an uncontrolled and unregulated manner, leading to a constant consumption of land not accompanied by adequate demographic and economic growth. To better understand the evolution and dynamics of the LULCCs and provide useful tools for formulating territorial planning policies and strategies aimed at a sustainable use of the territory, the socio-economic aspects of the Region were investigated. A first phase involved the creation of a database and the study and identification of essential services in the area as a fundamental parameter against which to evaluate the quality of life in a specific area. The supply of essential services can be understood as an assessment of the lack of minimum requirements with reference to the urban functions exercised by each territorial unit. From a territorial point of view, the level of peripherality of the territories with respect to the network of urban centres profoundly influences the quality of life of citizens and the level of social inclusion. In these, the presence of essential services can act as an attractor capable of generating discrete catchment areas. The purpose of this first part of the work was above all to create a dataset of data useful for the calculation of various socio-economic indicators, in order to frame the demographic evolution and the evolution of the stock of public and private services. The first methodological approach was to reconstruct the offer of essential services through the use of open data in a GIS environment and subsequently estimate the peripherality of each municipality by estimating the accessibility to essential services. The study envisaged the use of territorial analysis techniques aimed at describing the distribution of essential services on the regional territory. It is essential to understand the role of demographic dynamics as a driver of urban land use change such as, for example, the increase in demand for artificial surfaces that occurs locally. Social and economic analyses are important in the spatial planning process. Comparison of socio-economic analyses with land use and land cover change can highlight the need to modify existing policies or implement new ones. A particular land use can degrade and thereby destroy other land resources. If the economic analysis shows that the use is beneficial from the point of view of the land user, it is likely to continue, regardless of whether the process is environmentally friendly. It is important to understand and investigate which drivers have been and will be in the future the most decisive in these dynamics that intrinsically contribute to land take, agricultural abandonment and the consequent processes of land degradation and to define policies or thresholds to mitigate and monitor the effects of these processes. Subsequently, the issues of land take and abandonment of agricultural land were analysed by applying models and techniques of remote sensing, GIS and territorial analysis for the identification and monitoring of abandoned agricultural areas and sealed areas. The classic remote sensing methods have also been integrated by some geostatistical analyses which have provided more information on the investigated phenomenon. The aim was the creation of a quick methodology that would allow to describe the monitoring and analysis activities of the development trends of soil consumption and the monitoring and identification of degraded areas. The first methodology proposed allowed the automatic and rapid detection of detailed LULCC and Land Take maps with an overall accuracy of more than 90%, reducing costs and processing times. The identification of abandoned agricultural areas in degradation is among the most complicated LULCC and Land Degradation processes to identify and monitor as it is driven by a multiplicity of anthropic and natural factors. The model used to estimate soil erosion as a degradation phenomenon is the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE). To identify potentially degraded areas, two factors of the RUSLE have been correlated: Factor C which describes the vegetation cover of the soil and Factor A which represents the amount of potential soil erosion. Through statistical correlation analysis with the RUSLE factors, on the basis of the deviations from the average RUSLE values and mapping of the areas of vegetation degradation, relating to arable land, through statistical correlation with the vegetation factor C, the areas were identified and mapped that are susceptible to soil degradation. The results obtained allowed the creation of a database and a map of the degraded areas to be paid attention to

Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis for Land-Take Assessment in Basilicata Region (Southern Italy)

Land use is one of the drivers of land-cover change (LCC) and represents the conversion of natural to artificial land cover. This work aims to describe the land-take-monitoring activities and analyze the development trend in test areas of the Basilicata region. Remote sensing is the primary technique for extracting land-use/land-cover (LULC) data. In this study, a new methodology of classification of Landsat data (TM-OLI) is proposed to detect land-cover information automatically and identify land take to perform a multi-temporal analysis. Moreover, within the defined model, it is crucial to use the territorial information layers of geotopographic database (GTDB) for the detailed definition of the land take. All stages of the classification process were developed using the supervised classification algorithm support vector machine (SVM) change-detection analysis, thus integrating the geographic information system (GIS) remote sensing data and adopting free and open-source software and data. The application of the proposed method allowed us to quickly extract detailed land-take maps with an overall accuracy greater than 90%, reducing the cost and processing time

Monitoring and modeling urban sprinkling: a new perspective of land take

According to the studies done until now on the recent urban transformation dynamics, namely urban sprinkling, this thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon from different points of view to bring out its unsustainable character. The urban dispersion phenomena, specific characteristic of low-density territories, will be examined through the sprinkling index by including new components in addition to the traditional settlement system components. It allows to evaluate the shape of the anthropic settlements and the distance between them which often results in fragmentation of the urban settlements which in turn generate landscape fragmentation. Nowadays, both in the proximity of large cities and in more external areas such as rural areas, there are often evidences of strong fragmentation of the anthropic settlements in which, even if the amount of occupied surface (land take) may not seem worrying, its configuration determines a general decrease in ecological connectivity, landscape quality and general degradation of soil functions. The general hypothesis is that fragmentation (of urban, landscape and habitat) can become an indicator of land take. In fact, it is not enough to consider only the loss of natural or agricultural areas, but also the distribution of buildings in the landscape matrix, i.e., its spatial component. An emblematic case is that of Basilicata region whose dynamics of transformation from the 50s to the present day will be investigated in this thesis. According to the latest report of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA 2020), the Basilicata region has only 3.15% of land consumption compared to the entire regional surface. This indicator is in contrast with the shape of the anthropic settlements which results fragmented and dispersed. It is essential that the effects of fragmentation as well as ecosystem disaggregation take on a "measurable" character, joining the list of indicators of urban and territorial quality such as land take and land consumption that European Union addresses to national communities currently consider essential and decisive to highlighting the efficiency/inefficiency of environmental and landscape management. It is crucial to understand and investigate what have been and will be in the future the most influential drivers on these dynamics that contribute intrinsically to land consumption and to define the addresses or the thresholds to contain this pulverized and disordered dissemination of anthropic settlements

Valorisation of residual biomass generated by the primary sector for a circular bioeconomy

Circular economy aims to create a system that allows optimal reuse of products and materials. The term defines an economy designed to regenerate itself. In a circular economy, there are two material flows: the biological ones, able to be reintegrated into the biosphere, and the technical ones, destined to be enhanced without entering the biosphere. The circular economy is therefore a system in which all activities, starting with extraction and production, are organised so that someone's waste becomes a resource for someone else, i.e. an economic system planned to reuse materials in subsequent production cycles, minimising waste. In the linear economy, on the other hand, once consumption is over, the product cycle ends and it becomes waste, forcing the economic chain to continuously repeat the same pattern: extraction, production, consumption, disposal. In this context, the contribution provided by the valorisation of residual biomass and municipal waste is fundamental for the production of renewable biological resources and their conversion into new value-added products. This is the background to the thesis work which has been divided into three main parts. After an in-depth study on the circular economy concept, the differences and points of contact with the bioeconomy concept and above all the opportunities linked to it, in collaboration with University of Basilicata (Scientific part of the project) a general review was carried out. This review has considered the residual biomasses coming from the various agricultural activities (mowings and pruning by-products), from zootechnical activities (sludge deriving from animal manure, etc.), from agro-food activities (deriving from olive, wine, dairy, cereal processing, etc.) and from forestry activities (from forest cutting and use, forest cleaning, etc.) that are practised in the Basilicata region. Subsequently, a focus and a cognitive survey on the by-products generated by the wine sector in the Basilicata region, on their reuse state of the art and on their possible valorisation forms with particular attention to restoring soil fertility with a view to the circular economy, was carried out. The industrial part of the project, instead, was carried out with the collaboration of Innova - Consorzio per l'Informatica e la Telematica srl. After a general review of the waste legislation in the Basilicata region –especially the differences between waste and by-products - the problems related to the state of the art concerning their production, management and disposal, the phD thesis work has focused on the feasibility study (economic and environmental) of new models for the management, treatment and valorisation of organic waste flows (from separate collection) and agricultural by-products (especially those coming from wine supply chain) from the perspective of the circular economy as an alternative to the current models based on the linear economy. These new governance models called "proximity composting" and “home composting”, alternative and more sustainable than the current one, on the other hand aim at a more sustainable management of these flows based on their “zero-kilometers treatment”. On the other hand, they aim to empower the communities that become an active part of the process: citizens are directly involved and partially autonomous in the management of their municipality waste. Specifically, starting from a basic organisational idea, an in-depth study on its real feasibility was carried out, based on an integrated planning of the different aspects involved in the elaboration of the models themselves. Subsequently, the discussion focused on IoT (Internet of Things) technologies applied to the proposed models with a dual purpose: remote control and monitoring in Near Real Time of each phase of the process: the flows collection, the transport, the final destination and the variation of the various parameters during the proposed composting process; possibility of implementing the "punctual tax" in accordance with the Ministerial Decree on the Environment of April 20, 2017. The proposed models, alternatives to the current one - composting in very distant industrial plants - which is unsustainable, very expensive and disadvantageous, aim first of all to improve separate collection in each municipality, and consequently to reduce the amount of organic waste to be treated, but also to give wine by-products a more sustainable second life, in the context of the circular economy. Finally, in cooperation with the international partner of the project, the Energy Agency of Plovdiv (EAP), after studying the state of the art regarding the production, management and treatment of municipal waste in the city of Plovdiv, the related problems and possible future challenges, the home composting model, hypothesised for the Basilicata Region, has been adapted to this city. As in the case of the Basilicata region, the model has been planned and studied from an economic and environmental point of view, and its feasibility has confirmed that it could be a good alternative to the current one, which does not provide for separate collection, but directly for the disposal of urban waste in landfills

A New Life for Landscape, Architecture and Design

The volume entitled A New Life for Landscape, Architecture and Design encloses 14 essays, research and original experiments, projects and interventions. While they address only some of the issues listed in the introduction, they are food for thought and contain good practices capable of give a contribution to the international debate on the subject

Building the Urban Bioregion. Governance scenarios for urban and territorial planning

The book focuses on bioregionalist theories and experiences as an alternative way of reading and designing local contexts, based on the recovery of the co-evolutionary relationship between human settlements and territories to achieve a self-sustainable and non-hierarchical system of urban and rural centers, according to Alberto Magnaghi's vision. The work has developed a broader discussion among researchers from different European backgrounds about the ways in which processes related to bioregionalism, looked at in a transdisciplinary way, can lead to interesting applications and analytical insights, that are useful for reviewing and strengthening community self-organization and reflecting on the constitutive foundations of the relationship between communities and their territories. The collaboration between the French school of Bordeaux, the Tuscany school and the Cagliari school gives back a diversified overview of materials and references for the possible application of the bioregionalist model.The contributions discuss many issues related to the governance of metropolitan areas and the management of the urban-rural relationship with suggestions for interpretation and design in a bioregionalist perspective, the themes of urban green, land vulnerability, and agricultural supply chains in rural and peri-urban spaces and new food economies in metropolitan areas

Essays on the challenges of global land change science

This dissertation considers selected economic aspects of global land change science. The first set of three papers analyses different aspects of the sustainability regulation within the European biofuel policy. The first paper analyses the greenhouse gas balance of biofuels when taking into account direct land use change. The second paper revises the aspect of indirect land use change by evaluating approaches for quantifying indirect land use change and related policy proposals. The third paper analyses policy instruments for reducing emissions from land use change caused by biofuels in a case study for Sumatra and Kalimantan based on a carbon map. The forth paper analyzes the heterogeneity in agricultural productivity of Brazilian agriculture by applying a latent common factor model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity. The fifth paper analyses the suitability of satellite based night light data as a proxy for regional growth in GDP

Atti del XXI Convegno Nazionale di Agrometeorologia Agrometeorologia per le Politiche di Sviluppo Rurale Agrometeorology for Rural Development Policies

Lo studio delle interazioni dei fattori meteorologici ed idrologici con l’ecosistema agrario - forestale e con l’agricoltura, intesa nel suo senso più ampio, è oggetto di una particolare disciplina, l’agrometeorologia, che negli ultimi anni ha assunto un ruolo sempre più rilevante nella pianificazione agricola, a causa della maggiore variabilità meteorologica e in particolare della crescente diffusione e intensificazione dei fenomeni estremi. Questo ruolo è stato pienamente riconosciuto nelle recenti normative europee sull’agricoltura, in particolare con le direttive della nuova Politica Agricola Comunitaria (PAC2014-2020) sulla produzione integrata e sull’agricoltura biologica, sistemi agricoli a basso impatto ambientale che prevedono l’uso coordinato e razionale di tutti i fattori della produzione, per ridurre al minimo il ricorso a mezzi tecnici che hanno un impatto sull’ambiente o sulla salute dei consumatori. L’attuazione di tali tecniche agricole si avvale di informazioni che derivano principalmente dalla modellistica agronomica, che utilizza il dato agrometeorologico nelle procedure di elaborazione. La conferma dell’importanza attribuita all’agrometeorologia è data dalla Direttiva europea 2009/128/CE del 21 ottobre 2009 che istituisce un quadro comunitario per l’uso sostenibile dei prodotti fitosanitari, applicata a livello italiano attraverso l’approvazione del Piano d’Azione Nazionale sull’uso dei prodotti fitosanitari (PAN, approvato con DM22/01/2014). La Rete Rurale Nazionale, programma con cui l’Italia partecipa al più ampio progetto europeo (Rete Rurale Europea - RRE) che accompagna e integra tutte le attività legate allo sviluppo delle aree rurali per il periodo 2014-2020, mira a supportare le politiche di sviluppo delle aree agricole, con il fine ultimo di favorire scambi di esperienze e conoscenze tra gli operatori del settore e le istituzioni e tutti i soggetti che operano e vivono nelle aree rurali. Nello specifico ambito, si pone l’obiettivo di supportare Regioni e Province Autonome (di seguito denominate Autorità di Gestione – AdG) nell’adempimento degli obblighi di legge, per una migliore diffusione delle tecniche agrometeorologiche sul territorio nazionale, con particolare riferimento all’applicazione di modelli di stima, simulazione e previsione, per la difesa da avversità biotiche e abiotiche, per la razionalizzazione dell’uso dell’acqua e delle risorse energetiche (fertilizzanti, diserbanti, fitofarmaci, ecc.). In questo contesto il Centro di ricerca Politiche e Bioeconomia e il Centro di ricerca Agricoltura e Ambiente, del Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria (CREA) con l’Associazione Italiana di Agrometeorologia (AIAM) promuovono insieme il 21° Convegno Nazionale, al fine di fornire nuove ricerche e servizi per affrontare le nuove sfide agro-climaticoambientali nel contesto delle politiche di sviluppo Rurale. Il Convegno sarà ospitato dal CREA Centro di ricerca Difesa e Certificazione

Atti del XXI Convegno Nazionale di Agrometeorologia Agrometeorologia per le Politiche di Sviluppo Rurale Agrometeorology for Rural Development Policies

Lo studio delle interazioni dei fattori meteorologici ed idrologici con l’ecosistema agrario - forestale e con l’agricoltura, intesa nel suo senso più ampio, è oggetto di una particolare disciplina, l’agrometeorologia, che negli ultimi anni ha assunto un ruolo sempre più rilevante nella pianificazione agricola, a causa della maggiore variabilità meteorologica e in particolare della crescente diffusione e intensificazione dei fenomeni estremi. Questo ruolo è stato pienamente riconosciuto nelle recenti normative europee sull’agricoltura, in particolare con le direttive della nuova Politica Agricola Comunitaria (PAC2014-2020) sulla produzione integrata e sull’agricoltura biologica, sistemi agricoli a basso impatto ambientale che prevedono l’uso coordinato e razionale di tutti i fattori della produzione, per ridurre al minimo il ricorso a mezzi tecnici che hanno un impatto sull’ambiente o sulla salute dei consumatori. L’attuazione di tali tecniche agricole si avvale di informazioni che derivano principalmente dalla modellistica agronomica, che utilizza il dato agrometeorologico nelle procedure di elaborazione. La conferma dell’importanza attribuita all’agrometeorologia è data dalla Direttiva europea 2009/128/CE del 21 ottobre 2009 che istituisce un quadro comunitario per l’uso sostenibile dei prodotti fitosanitari, applicata a livello italiano attraverso l’approvazione del Piano d’Azione Nazionale sull’uso dei prodotti fitosanitari (PAN, approvato con DM22/01/2014). La Rete Rurale Nazionale, programma con cui l’Italia partecipa al più ampio progetto europeo (Rete Rurale Europea - RRE) che accompagna e integra tutte le attività legate allo sviluppo delle aree rurali per il periodo 2014-2020, mira a supportare le politiche di sviluppo delle aree agricole, con il fine ultimo di favorire scambi di esperienze e conoscenze tra gli operatori del settore e le istituzioni e tutti i soggetti che operano e vivono nelle aree rurali. Nello specifico ambito, si pone l’obiettivo di supportare Regioni e Province Autonome (di seguito denominate Autorità di Gestione – AdG) nell’adempimento degli obblighi di legge, per una migliore diffusione delle tecniche agrometeorologiche sul territorio nazionale, con particolare riferimento all’applicazione di modelli di stima, simulazione e previsione, per la difesa da avversità biotiche e abiotiche, per la razionalizzazione dell’uso dell’acqua e delle risorse energetiche (fertilizzanti, diserbanti, fitofarmaci, ecc.). In questo contesto il Centro di ricerca Politiche e Bioeconomia e il Centro di ricerca Agricoltura e Ambiente, del Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria (CREA) con l’Associazione Italiana di Agrometeorologia (AIAM) promuovono insieme il 21° Convegno Nazionale, al fine di fornire nuove ricerche e servizi per affrontare le nuove sfide agro-climaticoambientali nel contesto delle politiche di sviluppo Rurale. Il Convegno sarà ospitato dal CREA Centro di ricerca Difesa e Certificazione