Historical maps processed into a GIS for the assessment of forest landscape dynamics.

During the last decades, changes in land use and management led to the degradation of traditional rural landscapes, mostly in Mediterranean areas, with relevant consequences for local populations, landscape functionality and the maintenance of ecosystem services. The analysis of modifications occurred in rural land, as well as in mountain areas of some internal Regions - like the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy), in which the continuous abandonment of agriculture is relentlessly reshaping the landscape patterns - is crucial to understand their profound transformations, and to reconstruct their landscape original structure, so as to avoid negative impacts (e.g., loss of biodiversity, land degradation, hydrogeological instability, etc.). One of the observed connected phenomena is the continuous increase in the forest surface. In this work, data from the official Italian dataset and “Land Copernicus” program have been implemented into a GIS environment, together with some historical thematic cartographies (the 1936 Italian Kingdom Forest Map and the National Research Council Map of Land Cover 1960) and ancillary data, to evaluate the main dynamics of landscape and forest environment transformation in the last century. After this general assessment, the changes that affected the forest areas have been then analysed in terms of surfaces and vegetation types.