Investigating the time evolution of a rural landscape: How historical maps may provide environmental information when processed using a GIS

A rural landscape is the result of the interaction among natural elements and human activities which takes place in time and space. It represents a non-renewable resource that can provide incomparable information on the general state of the environment. The rapid transformations that are taking place in the last century push towards the implementation of monitoring actions able to take into account the various components of the land use, including their concurrent time evolution as well. We performed an analysis of temporal transformations of a rural landscape using an open-source GIS approach that allowed for mainstreaming of the main features of this rural landscape, i.e. land use patterns, naturalness dynamics, landscape diversity and visual quality. These four parameters have been selected since they represent those which most affect the processes at the base of the environmental planning and management of a rural landscape. The survey has been carried out over a period of 138?years, using historical maps, interpretation of aerial photos and implementing digital cartography, that have been retrieved with reference to a study area located in the Basilicata Region (southern Italy), which is considered a territory with an high rural - i.e., both natural and agricultural - landscape value. This methodology has allowed for the examination of the landscape from different points of view, experimenting the performance of a multi-temporal and inter-disciplinary analysis. The main results show - since the landscape has been completely transformed by man in terms of land use - that the areas covered in the past by forest have been transformed into agricultural areas, as opposed to some areas where re-naturalisation processes have taken place. Starting from this first analysis, the implemented methodology, based on a multidisciplinary approach, has enabled to identify the transformations which have greatly influenced the time evolution of the study area. The resulted assessment of land use patterns, landscape diversity, naturalness dynamics and visual quality of this study area, thus enables suitable strategies for the restoration of the local rural ecosystems.