Analysis of the evolution of a rural landscape by combining SAR geodata with GIS techniques.

In the last decades, Mediterranean rural landscapes have undergone significant changes, with relevant considerable environmental and socio-economic impacts. These phenomena are often triggered by agricultural abandonment, especially in environmentally-sensitive areas, which are usually located in marginal and less profitable regions, and which could indeed irremedia-bly compromise the identity and role of these Mediterranean landscapes. On the other hand, the progressive increase of available multi-source geodata allows to reconstruct the landscape original structure, providing new tools able to prevent negative impacts on environment. Hence, thanks to the development of increasingly advanced and open-source GIS tools, it is possible to implement several geodata typologies that can be mutually integrated in an in-creasingly efficient approach. In this paper the process of landscape reshaping pattern is ana-lyzed in a study area of Basilicata region (Southern Italy) using remote sensing. In particular, the vegetation component of a landscape has been assessed by means of SAR images by us-ing an artificial intelligence approach, that is machine learning to understand landscape dy-namics in two different time periods. In this way, it has been possible to integrate data of dif-ferent source and composition into landscape analysis methodologies, hence developing a suitable tool for planning and managing the rural landscape.