Multitemporal analysis of forest landscape in the province of Siena (Italy) using historical maps

The analysis of land use and land cover change has long been a key topic in landscape ecology. In particular, forest fragmentation is known to affect plant species composition and diversity, thus threatening the integrity of forest habitats. In many areas of Mediterranean basin, a particular pattern of land cover change has been reported, consisting in the increasing agriculture use of plain areas and the abandonment of hilly and mountain areas, with these latter undergoing a process of natural forest expansion. The aim of this paper is to examine forest expansion and dynamics over a whole province (Siena) in central of Italy, by comparing historical and recent forest maps. The historical map has been georeferenced and digitized in a GIS environment and classified in 3 forest classes: deciduous, conifer and mixed forests. Image processing techniques and landscape pattern metrics have been applied to quantify the changes in forest cover patterns. Further, standard statistical descriptors have been to investigate the relationship between land cover changes and topographical factors. The results show that forest expansion resulted in a landscape transformation according to well defined topographic patterns.