Abstract
Land use by humans strongly alters the landscape mosaic, either by reducing or increasing its heterogeneity. One of the most recent and widespread land use changes in Europe has been the spontaneous reforestation of marginal agricultural lands. These primarily affected small landscape patches, such as trees outside forests (TOF) and small open areas (SOA), often represent the most diversifying features of landscape’ structures. Nevertheless, only small-scale studies can be found in the literature and thus it remains a relatively unexplored issue. Integrating inventory and cartographic approaches, this work assesses changes in abundance, coverage, and average size of small patches in Italy between 1990 and 2013. Main results showed an overall increase in number and coverage of small patches during the reference period. The average patch size remains unaltered for TOF but decreases significantly for SOA, due to trees encroachment and canopy cover increasing in forests. Our findings confirm the important changes in Mediterranean land mosaics and contribute to a better understanding of current conditions and recent trends regarding TOF and SOA. The integrated approach has proven to be helpful for the large-scale assessment of small patches dynamics, representing a viable monitoring tool to encourage the inclusion of small patches in landscape policy and planning.
Highlights
Natural processes and human activities might change landscape patterns over time
The main findings of the study reveal that the overall number and coverage of small patches, considering both trees outside forests (TOF) and small open areas (SOA), increased during the 1990–2013 period
Even though the increase in the number of patches is higher for SOA (+181.6%) than for TOF (+17.1%), the opposite trend is visible for their total coverage (+18.0% and +27.4%, respectively)
Summary
Natural processes and human activities might change landscape patterns over time. This will affect the configuration and distribution of the spatial elements of the land mosaic and their contribution to ecological processes [1]. The spatial elements of a land mosaic contribute to its heterogeneity and fragmentation, and have positive effects on ecosystem functionality and resilience [2,3]. Patches–relative homogeneous areas that differ from their surroundings—are among the spatial elements of the land mosaic whose geometry and spatial configuration are important for ecosystem functionality [4]. Humans have driven landscape dynamics much more than natural evolution [7,8] Forests 2018, 9, 701 within the land mosaic have a strong impact on ecological processes and, in turn, on the functioning of socio-economic and ecological systems [5,6].
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