Fifty Years on: Long‐term Patterns of Land Sensitivity to Desertification in Italy

Abstract

The Mediterranean region has been regarded as a critical hotspot for desertification due to the impact of soil degradation, the land‐use changes and the climate variations. Few large‐scale studies have been devoted to analyse trends in land sensitivity to desertification in the northern Mediterranean basin. The present paper contributes to this deserving issue by quantifying the level of land sensitivity to desertification in Italy at seven points between 1960 and 2010 at a fine spatial scale. The approach used followed the Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme that assesses changes in four key themes (climate, soil, vegetation and land management) related to land degradation processes. Italian land was classified into four levels of sensitivity to desertification (non‐affected, potentially affected, fragile and critical) according to the Environmentally Sensitive Area framework. Interestingly, although land surface area classified as ‘fragile’ and ‘critical’ grew homogeneously in Italy between 1960 and 1990, the increase observed in the most recent time period was spatially clustered and contributed to reverse the polarisation in ‘structurally vulnerable’ and ‘non‐affected’ regions observed in Italy. The paper discussed these trends in the light of socioeconomic changes that occurred in Italy after World War II. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Estimating the sensitivity to desertification of Italian forests

“…Significant changes over time in land sensitivity to degradation were checked by using non-parametric inference (Mann-Whitney U test) testing at p < 0.001 after Bonferroni's correction for multiple comparisons when appropriate. Effectiveness of the applied method has been also shown by Salvati et al (2013b).…”

“…2), to map into fourteen vegetation classes on a 1:100.000 scale (minimum mapping unit 25 ha) the land covered by forests and sclerophyllous vegetation in Italy (over 75 000 km 2 ). Following Salvati et al (2013bSalvati et al ( , 2013c, CLC 2000 and ESAI 2000 as well as CLC 2006 and ESAI 2010 maps were overlaid (Fig. 1) to derive a descriptive statistics for ESAI (mean, range and maximum score) for different spatial units, using the "zonal statistics" tool provided with the ArcGIS software (ESRI, Inc., Redwoods, USA).…”

“…This result might be explained by the substantial increase of the average ESAI in northern Italy, due to the reduction of rainfall amounts and increasing population density ; conversely in southern Italy, slight improvements in the ESAI conditions have been occurring in the last years (Salvati et al 2013b), in turn linked with natural forestation (Corona et al 2009) and a slowly declining human pressure on land (e.g., reduced population density due to land abandonment) in marginal rural districts (Salvati & Zitti 2011).…”

“…The ESA method has been extensively validated at several sites in southern Europe (Kosmas et al 1999, Basso et al 2010, Salvati et al 2013b, 2013c, in middle and far East (Sepher et al 2007, Honardoust et al 2011) and in Africa, also for climate change analysing ); a regional assessment (Lavado Contador et al 2009), based on heterogeneous geographical datasets with different reliability, indicates the ESAI as a proxy for land degradation processes and identifies correlations with a number of indicators of soil degradation. Ferrara et al (2012) evaluated the stability of the ESAI using statistical analysis and the sensitivity to changes in the composing indicators.…”

The effects of grazing on the spatial pattern of elm (&lt;i&gt;Ulmus pumila&lt;/i&gt; L.) in the sparse woodland steppe of Horqin Sandy Land in northeastern China

“…The grazing impact on soils and vegetation causes some ecosystems to be affected by land degradation processes (Cerdà and Lavee, 1999;Mekuria et al, 2013;Tarhouni et al, 2015). Desertification, one of the most important types of land degradation, occurs widely in the world, especially in China (Izzo et al, 2013;Jafari et al, 2013;Salvati et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2013;Bisaro et al, 2014;Fleskens and Stringer, 2014).…”