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Assessing the resilience of communities is assuming greater importance at a time of global economic upheaval, climatic and socio-demographic change. The past 10-15 years have seen a significant increase in the number of studies addressing resilience issues at community level from a variety of perspectives, and although the resilience of communities in dealing with disturbances feature strongly in these studies, less work appears to have been undertaken at the interface between community resilience and land degradation. In addition, little attention has been paid to land degradation, desertification risk and community resilience at the forest-community interface, despite the fact that forest ecosystems represent one of the most important terrestrial biomes in terms of the ecosystem services and socioeconomic benefits that they provide. Building on existing community resilience literature, which highlights the importance of various socio-economic and political drivers for understanding community resilience, this study analyses how economic, institutional, social, cultural and natural factors at community level affect the ability of communities to adapt and adjust decision-making pathways towards resilience. The study focuses on the municipality of Gorgoglione (Basilicata, Italy), a typical Mediterranean forest and shrubland socioecological system characterised by a mixture of agricultural and forest landscapes, and prone to land degradation issues linked to both anthropogenic (deforestation, overgrazing, forest fires) and natural (soil erosion, droughts, climate aridity) causes. A case study approach is used, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data across spatial levels and temporal scales to examine the complex interrelationships between community resilience, forest ecosystems and land degradation.

In the last decades, due to climate changes, soil deterioration, and Land Use/Land Cover Changes (LULCCs), land degradation risk has become one of the most important ecological issues at the global level. Land degradation involves two interlocking systems: the natural ecosystem and the socio-economic system. The complexity of land degradation processes should be addressed using a multidisciplinary approach. Therefore, the aim of this work is to assess diachronically land degradation dynamics under changing land covers. This paper analyzes LULCCs and the parallel increase in the level of land sensitivity to degradation along the coastal belt of Sardinia (Italy), a typical Mediterranean region where human pressure affects the landscape characteristics through fires, intensive agricultural practices, land abandonment, urban sprawl, and tourism concentration. Results reveal that two factors mainly affect the level of land sensitivity to degradation in the study area: (i) land abandonment and (ii) unsustainable use of rural and peri-urban areas. Taken together, these factors represent the primary cause of the LULCCs observed in coastal Sardinia. By linking the structural features of the Mediterranean landscape with its functional land degradation dynamics over time, these results contribute to orienting policies for sustainable land management in Mediterranean coastal areas.

© iForest -Biogeosciences and Forestry IntroductionAssessment of natural forest expansion represents a crucial issue to elucidate several processes, including biogeochemical cycles, atmospheric composition related to climate change, and forest carbon uptake, as well as socio-economic processes and issues. Anthropogenic and naturally induced land cover changes affect spatial and temporal distribution and availability of environmental resources, and alter ecosystem composition and productivity. Globally, these processes can be considered the primary catalysts for change in biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric composition, and climate (Pielke 2005, Metz et al. 2007, Turner et al. 2007). Forest land-use and land-cover change (LU-LCC) were recognised as key issues in greenhouse gas removal/emission processes as specified by the Good Practices Guidance for Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry (GPG-LULUCF) during the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established at the Kyoto Protocol (Penman et al. 2003). Observation and assessment of forest cover changes are crucial to elucidate the complexities inherent in feedback processes between forest distribution and human activities in sustainable forest development, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem functioning, and biogeochemical cycling (IPCC 2007). In Mediterranean regions, natural forest expansion is primarily related to the abandonment of agricultural practices and cattle-raising in marginal areas representing the principal change in Italy's Mediterranean rural landscape over the past five decades (Piussi 2005). These processes generally vary in terms of the vegetation successional series and time scale, however the expansion dynamics are shared, beginning with an initial phase of spontaneous shrub dominance, followed by tree colonisation (Biondi et al. 2006).In recent decades, satellite-based high-resolution observations with multispectral scanners provided the scientific community with consistent data to implement detailed thematic mapping for local and regional scale land classification (Friedl et al. 2002, 2010, Lu & Weng 2007, Giri 2012. The near infrared wavebands on the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) facilitates advanced land classification analyses based on differences in spectral reflectance of different land cover types. In particular, specific foliar reflectance, pigment absorptions, and foliar moisture wavelength ranges represent the basis of vegetation class analyses. Furthermore, the availability of such land cover data at different spatial and temporal scales promotes the development and implementation of vegetation change detection techniques, which furthers our understanding on vegetation and ecosystem dynamics (Cohen & Fiorella 1998, Coppin et al. 2004, Lu et al. 2004, Martinez & Gilabert 2009).In forest ecosystems, land cover change dynamic detection based on visual and statistical approaches represents a challenge to the scientific community due to the difficulties in remotely sensed image acquisition err...

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