In this paper the authors analyse the land cover transformation in the mine district of Montevecchio,
through the integration of vegetational and multitemporal landscape analysis. For this
purpose, three important dates (1955, 1977, 2000) of the district history have been considered and
two different periods are analysed (1955-1977 and 1977-2000). Multitemporal analysis was carried
out through the study of aerial photographs which resulted in the production of three 1:10.000
land cover maps. Vegetational data were obtained through the phytosociological study of the area.
The results show the evolution of the natural vegetation as general trend in the territory. Particular
analysis was carried out on the mining areas (mining dumps, surface mines and tailing dams) to
understand how much and how have been re-colonized by the native vegetation. For the mining
dumps the main transformations are towards the mediterranean maquis, the garrigue and the corkoak
woods. The surface mines was stable in the first period for 73.6% and the main changes are
due to the diffusion of natural vegetation (e.g. to mediterranean maquis 14.7%). With regard to the
tailing dams we observed an increase of stability (from 81.6% to 96.1%) together with a global
increase of surface from 1955 to 2000. Therefore, the integration of the multitemporal and the
vegetational analysis made possible to register a significant evolution of the vegetation cover on
incoherent and polluted materials in relatively short times