The Harvesting Memories Project: Historical ecology and landscape changes of the Sicani Mountains in Sicily (original) (raw)
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Sustainability
Since 2015, the ongoing project “Harvesting Memories” has been focused on long-term landscape dynamics in Sicani Mountains (Western Sicily). Archaeological excavations in the case study site of Contrada Castro (Corleone) have investigated a settlement which was mainly occupied during the Early Middle Ages (late 8th–11th century AD). This paper aims to understand the historical suitability and sustainability of this area analysing the correlation between the current dynamics of plant communities and the historical use of woods detected by the archaeobotanical record. An integrated approach between phytosociology and archaeobotany has been applied. The vegetation series of the study area has been used as a model to understand the ecological meaning and spatial distribution of archaeobotanical data on charcoals from the Medieval layers of the Contrada Castro site. The intersection between the frequency data of the archaeobotanical record and the phytosociological analysis have confirme...
Sustainability, 2020
Since 2015, the ongoing project "Harvesting Memories" has been focused on long-term landscape dynamics in Sicani Mountains (Western Sicily). Archaeological excavations in the case study site of Contrada Castro (Corleone) have investigated a settlement which was mainly occupied during the Early Middle Ages (late 8th-11th century AD). This paper aims to understand the historical suitability and sustainability of this area analysing the correlation between the current dynamics of plant communities and the historical use of woods detected by the archaeobotanical record. An integrated approach between phytosociology and archaeobotany has been applied. The vegetation series of the study area has been used as a model to understand the ecological meaning and spatial distribution of archaeobotanical data on charcoals from the Medieval layers of the Contrada Castro site. The intersection between the frequency data of the archaeobotanical record and the phytosociological analysis have confirmed the maintenance of the same plant communities during the last millennium due to the sustainable exploitation of wood resources. An integrated comparison between the structure and composition of current phytocoenoses with archaeobotanical data allowed us to confirm that this landscape is High Nature Value (HNV) farmland and to interpret the historical vegetation dynamics linked to the activities and economy of a rural community.
in this paper the authors analyse the land cover transformation in the mine district of Mon-tevecchio, through the integration of vegetational and multitemporal landscape analysis. For this purpose, three important dates (1955, 1977, 2000) of the district history have been considered and two different periods are analysed (1955-1977 and 1977-2000). Multitemporal analysis was carried out through the study of aerial photographs which resulted in the production of three 1:10.000 land cover maps. Vegetational data were obtained through the phytosociological study of the area. the results show the evolution of the natural vegetation as general trend in the territory. Particular analysis was carried out on the mining areas (mining dumps, surface mines and tailing dams) to understand how much and how have been re-colonized by the native vegetation. For the mining dumps the main transformations are towards the mediterranean maquis, the garrigue and the cork-oak woods. The surface mines was ...
Land
The current characteristics of a rural landscape may be better understood if suitable information related to its past is available. The availability of a Geographical Information System (GIS) can enable the analysis of landscape features in relation to several aspects, e.g., the evolution and mutual inter-relation among different ecosystems, the impact and sustainability of human activities, the visual characteristics of a landscape, etc. The analysis of geographical information, derived from historical maps, within a GIS could, therefore, prove to be a very powerful tool, for a better-informed decision-making and management of a rural landscape. With the aim to identify the land use changes in a rural area located in the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy), a territorial analysis was conducted through a GIS, in which data taken from historical maps—covering a period of 184 years, from 1829 to 2013—were implemented. Three-dimensional reconstruction of the rural landscape during diffe...
2010
The present study analyses the landscape evolution on wild area, through the determination of the environment fragmentation and the application of metric indices developed from the landscape ecology using time series high-quality GIS dataset. We have been employed, to such aim, two temporal scenes of land use (1950 and 2000) that analysed through the methodology previewed from the change detection it has concurred to determine the evolution temporal space of the landscape. For a quantification of patch scale of such process we have been employed some important metric indices developed from the landscape ecology that, in theirs with, an exhaustive analysis of such process has concurred. Particular attention has been turned to the practicability analysing a third scene, year 1850, that it has concurred to analyse the study area in an antecedent historical period to the radical changes associate - cultural that have been taken place in the arc of XX century. From the moment that this infrastructure is thought a member that more than others it is in charge of the fragmentation phenomena, and therefore of the evolution of the landscaped matrix, we have been determined the main inherent parameters the density and the amplitude of the mesh. The study area has interested the Province of Viterbo (high Lazio).
Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that: (1) abrupt environmental change was more closely linked to sociopolitical and demographic transformation than climate change; (2) landscape changes reflected the new sociopolitical priorities and persisted until the sociopolitical conditions shifted; (3) reorganization of new plant communities was very rapid, on the order of decades not centuries; and (4) legacies of forest management adopted by earlier societies continue to influence ecosystem services today. Published in: Scientific Reports 8 (2018) 2138 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20286-4