L’analisi della continuità ambientale nel pesaggio rurale

In areas of intensive agriculture -where, very often, the territory has been shaped according to production needs -ecological networks can become an effective instrument for reaching a greater environmental stability, for introducing multiple uses and for productive diversification in the primary sector, showing itself to comply with recent rural development policies issued by the European Union.The reference to the ecological networks, identified as linear structures aimed at guaranteeing the environmental, physical and management conditions of the territory necessary for the survival of ecosystems and wild species, gives an important role to the agricultural areas that take on a decisive role in guaranteeing the presence of a widespread naturalness. The aim of this work is to define methods, based on GIS technology, that allow an integrated analysis of the landscape components(biotical and abiotical) for the identification of the ecological network within the rural territory: this method of analysis is functional to the representation of scale–dependent effects in cartographic surveys. The models of habitat suitability are useful to represent the set of areas of great ecological value and that are also protected. Land cover maps with different scales (1:25.000, 1:100.000) give different models of habitats, that have different effects in calculating indices for the measurement of landscape characteristics such as fragmentation and connectivity.