Towards the identification and mapping of traditional agricultural landscapes at the national scale: an inventory approach from Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper presents an original approach for identifying and mapping agricultural landscapes that are highly representative of different biogeographical and natural settings and likely to be traditional, at the national scale. In the case study of Italy, we used national land cover data of different dates to examine composition of agricultural types and their persistence over time while we employed national stratifications into ecoregions and potential natural vegetation (PNV) to include environmental representativeness. Implementing the procedure returned 120 landscapes, which are distributed across all ecoregions and 51% of the PNV types. Most landscapes match areas with certified and traditional produce (93%) and relevant potential vegetation (86%), whereas 30% overlap acknowledged historical rural landscapes. These results show that our approach highlights the coevolutionary process between traditional crops and the underlying environmental framework and, therefore, provides an ecologically sound coarse filter for selecting and mapping traditional agricultural landscapes.