The impact of soil fertility on the characteristics of the rural landscape for its protection.

The optimization of land use, entailing the integration of land, water and soil management, encompasses complex decisions, which ask for some appropriate socio-economic and ecological priorities. Soil represents a fundamental resource, which plays a key role in ecosystems, since it governs all the mechanisms at the basis of vegetal growth and of all components of the total environment concurring to the formation of a rural landscape. Therefore, the characteristics of soil fertility should be taken in the highest consideration when the analysis of a rural landscape is performed, to preserve pedo-diversity and its spatial variability. In this paper, a peculiar feature of the soils - such as the availability of organic matter and soil fertility - has been considered with reference to the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy). An ecological index has been also quantified there, to examine the complexity and fragmentation of relevant rural landscapes. The combined assessment of these two parameters has allowed to highlight the characteristics that generally do not appear immediately in the perception of a certain landscape, enabling the evaluation of the actual fragility of typical scenarios of the study area, hence paving the way to the formulation of new landscape protection policies.