Open Access Resources for the Study of the Spatial Dynamics of Cultural Agricultural and Rural Landscapes Through Land Use Changes. An Application to Apulia Region

Abstract

At international level, landscapes, especially rural ones, through their capacity to manifest the transformations of cultivation and land use, well express changes in the cultural value and identity of the territories, urging over time greater attention both in research and normative terms. The implementation of increasingly sophisticated study methods, through the use of open access resources, has favored the analysis of changes in land cover and land use, considered detectors of more complex phenomena such as the fragmentation of the landscape, the loss of sites and areas of significant environmental, cultural importance. In this study, after a preliminary review about the role of open access resources and data for the study of the aforementioned transformation processes, an application to the Apulia region of a spatial dynamics analysis developed in a GIS environment is presented using different sources: the open resources access Corine Land Cover from 1990 to 2018 of the International Copernicus Observatory; the Italian CNR Land Use Map at a scale of 1:200 000 for the various years of the Apulia region (CNR, 1956, 1959, 1960) and the Illustrative Volume for the region by Colamonico (1960). Through two phases of long and short-medium term analysis, by means of geoprocessing and cartographic correlation operations in a GIS environment, the main cultivation and land use changes in the region will be reconstructed, highlighting the loss of agricultural and cases of their respective traditional landscapes.