Coastal Landscape Qualità Index: Fragmentation and Biodiversity. An Application along the Apulian Coast

This work has been carried out by the IMCA Research (Integrated Monitoring of Coastal Areas), New technologies for survey, analysis and monitoring of environmental parameters financed by MIUR, within the activities to draw coastal landscape quality maps through the use of indexes taken from satellite remote sensing images. The researchthanks to the experience of the European Convention of Landscape, analyses the topics of Landscape Quality through scaling up processes, that is an interpretation of the phenomena according to spacial-temporal variables. The products of the research are maps, both when representing landscape conditions (for example, maps on the use of the land) and describing the changes that are taking place (changes map), to eventually recognise its criticality and values to formalise in a quality objectives map. The interpretation of changing processes and the buildig of intelligent maps integrate true data and remote sensing data with the double purpose of realising a phenomenological study aiming to modelling the transformations of the coastal landscape and of determining new classes of the survey that may have the temporal dimension as a reading parameter. In particular, the reading of changes speed is applied to the study of three different phenomena: fragmentation, biodiversity and coastal gradient.