The perception of the landscape by the population is one of the themes introduced by the European Landscape Convention. Perception is the key to the integration between human and territorial activities, and between economic development and sustainability. Local Action Groups (LAGs) are groups with territorial boundaries, established by the European Common Agricultural Policy for implementing local development strategies by awarding grants to local projects. The aim of this work is the development of a method for evaluating the ability of the LAGs to enhance the sense of belonging of the population with their territories. The developed method includes identification of those natural, agricultural, historical, and cultural resources for which people feel a sense of belonging, and evaluation of the same through a comprehensive multivariate statistical analysis. This paper reports the results of the statistical analysis of the rankings of local landscapes made by 330 residents of an Italian LAG on the basis of their sense of belonging with them. People showed that the community of the studied LAG does not recognize itself in the typical crops of the entire area, and the attachment to minor historical centres scattered in the territory remains the prerogative of the individual municipalities. The results of this method could be used as a performance indicator for a local plan, in respect to the creation of a shared perception of the local area.

By now it has become a widespread, consistent practice in the European Union to consider very carefully and to regard as fundamental the basic needs of man, such as health and safety, in relation to all productive activities which may be regarded as a possible source of environmental deterioration. At the national legislative level, factors and elements regarding the environment (water, atmosphere, soil, subsoil, landscape, etc.) have been pointed out which require the state of quality to be characterised and vulnerability to the pressures caused by man's activities to be evaluated.This has brought about an evolution in the concept itself of environmental quality, which is understood more and more as actual satisfying of man's needs through the proper use of resources and the maintaining of an environmental equilibrium.Environmental quality can be pursued, therefore, by studying the most appropriate usage of the territory and by considering quality no longer as a hindrance, rule or imposition, but as a goal shared by all in improving the quality of life.In this study a few instruments are proposed for evaluating the overall capacity of a given environmental element or group of elements to withstand deterioration caused by outside pressure, which in this specific case is pollution from farming and livestock waste and sewage.Territorial vulnerability can thus be evaluated through a decision support tool (fuzzy logic), which allows different categories of people (researchers, politicians, planning technicians, citizens, etc.) to be involved in the evaluation process.For this study, the vulnerability evaluation was applied to a complex, homogenous territorial system, the Tiber watershed, where there are environmental resources which are particularly sensitive, owing both to their intrinsic characteristics as well as to the pressures stemming from livestock production activities, which is one of the major pollution risks along the regional drainage pattern.The use of GIS software has allowed the method of analysis and prioritising to be applied to environmental factors (weighting) as well as the rapid management of initial territorial data, also of differing types (qualitative and quantitative).The resulting product is a vulnerability map where the territory is classified on the basis of the evaluations of the degree of response to stresses induced by the livestock production activities.

The EU “Water” Directive establishes a common European framework for the environmental protection of inland, coastal and marine waters. One of the major environmental concerns about water quality is certainly the N loads from agro-livestock systems. In this study, carried out in Umbria region, Italy, a novel spatial database for a multi-scale and multi-level analysis was designed and implemented integrating different agricultural and livestock farming datasets related to agro-livestock system. This database allows the calculation of different descriptive indicators about agricultural and livestock farming systems at different scales of investigation (NVZ, sub-basins, bodies of ground water, cadastral sheets, municipalities, provinces, entire region). Moreover, three relevant spatial indicators (potential nitrogen crop supply, potential nitrogen availability from livestock manure, and total potential nitrogen loads) were calculated applying an assessment model developed in the study. All this information appears very significant to support decision making at the various administrative levels and to pursue the environmental objectives established by EU and national regulations.

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