The Historical Transformation of Peri-Urban Land Use Patterns, via Landscape GIS-Based Analysis and Landscape Metrics, in the Vesuvius Area

Elena Cervelli,Stefania Pindozzi

doi:10.3390/app12052442

Abstract

Peri-urban areas constitute an enormous resource in terms of natural capital, landscape heritage and economic activities, but, at the same time, they are often affected by physical and socio-economic degradation, drawing the attention of decision makers and planners. Many studies have focused on these contexts both in terms of suburbs, with a close dependence on urban centers, and new land typologies. The present paper focuses on documentary evidence of the direct impacts of urban growth on rural lands. The study area entails the Vesuvius National Park, which, belonging the Naples metropolis, is well-known for its historical, geo-morphologic and naturalistic value. Furthermore, the area has a history of high-quality cartographic production: the 1817, 1907, 1960, 2009 time steps maps were digitized, georeferenced, vectorized and compared in a GIS environment. The results highlight a strong change in land-use, in vineyards and urban class types, with a more disaggregated landscape mosaic. The approach shows that the historical modeling of land-use changes supports the understanding of current land-use dynamics and landscape patterns. The study also shows the need to integrate landscape planning and landscape ecology approaches, highlighting the close interactions between urban, agricultural and natural areas, for the purpose of supporting decision makers in land-use management and conservation policies.

Highlights

Agro-forest land constitutes an enormous resource in terms of natural capital and cultural heritage, in addition to the economic/productive potentialities connected with primary sector activities
Within the main type of agro-forest lands, peri-urban areas hold an especially fragile and vulnerable status, as they still have a high potential for transformability, due to the close physical, functional and perceptive relationship with urban areas, which represent the most extreme expression of the anthropogenic transformation of the environment
Clipped on the urban class recognizable in the subsequent time step (1907, 1960, 2009, respectively); a fourth land use map was clipped with the buffer areas of 100 m around the urban areas of the 2009 map (Figure 6)

Summary

Introduction

Agro-forest land constitutes an enormous resource in terms of natural capital and cultural heritage, in addition to the economic/productive potentialities connected with primary sector activities. The unstable nature of peri-urban areas makes them susceptible to problems and critical issues; among them, physical and social marginality (the suburbs) is undoubtedly a constant issue, with important repercussions in terms of the productivity, safety and quality of the environment. This phenomenon is dramatic in large urban and metropolitan areas; degradation phenomena in peripheral areas involve medium and small urban areas, drawing the attention of decision makers and planners. They are treated as new land typologies, considered as transitional zones between definitively urban and unequivocally rural areas, with them being referenced to in several ways, namely as rural-urban fringes/transition zones or zones/areas of interfaces [3]

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