Artificial land use trends could represent an effective indicator of the settlement process quality and could also provide information about the efficacy of protection and exploitation policies in natural and rural areas. This work discusses an analytic procedure for the time series investigation of urban settlement development at the regional scale to verify the nexus between urban growth and demographic trends connected with the phenomenon of land take. In Italy, since 1950, the land take phenomenon has been a consequence of several factors: urbanization, realization of transport infrastructures including ports, airports, and highways, and the enhancement of industrial and productive systems. We analyzed all these territorial transformations that create waterproof soil, and more generally, a transition from natural and semi-natural uses toward artificial land use. After World War II, the demographic growth and the consequent housing demand generated a strong urbanization process in the main poles of economic development areas in Italy. Since the early 2000s, the situation has completely changed and the land take phenomenon is no longer mainly based on real need for new urban expansion areas based on effective urban planning tools, but is strongly related to a scattered demand for new housing in a weak territorial spatial planning system not able to drive effective urban development that minimizes speculative real estate initiatives. This uncontrolled occupation of soil generated, in Italy, a landscape fragmentation called the urban sprinkling phenomenon, different from urban sprawl, which is a wider phenomenon characterized by disordered urban growth. The present document aims to assess how uncontrolled expansion in areas characterized by low settlement density can generate fragmentation. To define if the territory is affected by the urban sprinkling phenomenon, two 50-year time series concerning urban expansion of buildings and demographic trends are analyzed calculating population and building density indices and their variation over the years. The sprinkling index is used to analyze the variation in the fragmentation degree at two different scales (regional and municipal). Finally, we discuss the context where this phenomenon has developed, analyzing the buildings located in hydrogeological risk zones and protected areas, and the correlation between demographic changes and the degree of territorial fragmentation variation.

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Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are part of the solution to tackle the global problems of climate change and carbon emissions. Programs and policies at different levels are continuing to promote new RES farms, posing a relevant challenge to regional planners and administrators: how to manage landscape transformation and territorial fragmentation to find a really effective sustainable arrangement for these kinds of technologies? Most effects induced by RES (land-use change, land take, diminishing aesthetic values, loss of habitat quality), without a doubt, depend on the location and the spatial pattern of the plants, the relative distance between them, the extension of secondary infrastructures and their technical characteristics. This work takes part in the debate, originating from the need to establish a monitoring system for this kind of new territorial transformation and discusses the implementation of a sprinkling fragmentation index (SPX) in order to assess the current regional settlement structure of RES farms. Our case study concerns the Basilicata region (in Southern Italy), a very low-density area which over the last decade has undergone a relevant increase in the installation of RES technologies, not supported by an effective planning framework. The evolution of the regional energy system has been strongly influenced both by incentive policies and by (weak) urban and territorial planning policies. This approach could be a valuable contribution both in identifying a fragmentation threshold beyond which the expected negative impacts outweigh the benefits, and in providing a useful procedure for the management of future installations.RES-related impacts already analyzed in recent scientific literature [5][6][7][8][9] are: change in land use, land take, natural habitat fragmentation, aesthetic impacts and micro-climate alteration.RES development is growing rapidly [10] and such a condition is one of the main causes of the lack of integration between energy planning (that in the Italian experience has been promoted without a clear analysis of the spatial dimension of the phenomena) and the urban and territorial planning system, traditionally unsuitable to be adapted in the short run to include arising instances that derive from new territorial transformation trends [11,12].At the moment, this type of transformation is regulated in a fragmented and sectorial way, with consequences that at a local level, risk being completely neglected and obscured by the global need to tackle climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.Such an issue highlights the need for an integrated territorial monitoring system allowing decision makers to provide effective policy making and governance of a territorial transformation able to demonstrate the sustainability of the results from the dual perspective of both global needs and preservation of local values.This work fits into the debate by testing the sprinkling index (SPX) [13], which has already been successful in representing the territorial fragmentation thanks to a di...

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The Natura 2000 network was established as a tool to preserve the biological diversity of the European territory with particular regard to vulnerable habitats and species. According to recent studies, a relevant percentage of Natura 2000 sites are expected to be lost by the end of this century and there is widespread evidence that biodiversity conservation policies are not fully effective in relation to the management plans of the protected areas. This paper addresses the issue by analyzing a specific case in which there is a problem of integration between different competences and sectoral policies that leads to the lack of a monitoring system of territorial management performances. The study area, located in the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy), includes a Site of National Interest (SNI), for which several reclamation projects are still in the submission/approval phase, and a partially overlapping Natura 2000 network site. The tool used to monitor biodiversity in the study area is the degradation map obtained through the “habitat quality and degradation” InVEST tool which is used to assess the current trend and thus define a baseline for comparison with two medium and long-term scenarios applicable to the SNI’s procedure of partial and total remediation. The proposed methodology is intended to be a part of a larger and more complex monitoring system that, developed within the framework of ecosystem services, allows for the overcoming of the limits related to fragmentation and contradictions that are present in land management by offering a valuable support to decision makers and the competent authorities in biodiversity conservation policy design.

This paper presents a spatiotemporal analysis to simulate and project urban sprinkling with coupled cellular automata (CA) and multinomial logistic regression (MLR) model. Our case study, the Basilicata region, south of Italy, is characterized by urban sprinkling-literally "a small amount of urban territory distributed in scattered particles". The region is witnessing a decoupled growth between demographic trend and urban expansion. We applied a coupled approach based on CA and MLR for urban sprinkling modeling and simulation. From three regional building datasets (1989, 1998 and 2013) building density maps were created and used to calibrate and validate the model and to project future urban expansion. Built-up causative factors were identified through an analysis of 19 articles that were compared and discussed according to their main features (methods, case studies, drivers, urbanization dynamics and demographic growth). The transition probability for the first period (1989-1998) was calibrated with MLR for built-up causative factors and with the multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) for CA neighborhood effects. The calibrated model was used to simulate the 2013 urban pattern which was compared with the actual map of 2013 (validation). We then used our calibrated model to simulate urban expansion in 2030. The results of the 2030 forecast show the largest variations in class 1 (low density built-up patches) that correspond to urban sprinkling.

Low-density dispersed urban development, known as “sprawl” or “sprinkling”, is an alternative configuration that best expresses the structure of the Italian urban system and is taking on increasingly significant dimensions. This phenomenon has increased in recent decades due to a weakening of the urban agglomeration force that had characterized the first half of the last century. Partial abandonment of agricultural activities and socio-economic changes led to the progressive urbanization of rural areas and the birth of widespread cities. This work discusses the externalities generated by sprawl, focusing on the tangible costs that this urban development model unloads on the people. In particular, the territory of the Basilicata Region is analyzed. Based on the data of some municipalities in the region, a relationship between the marginal costs relating to the greater linear infrastructure that sprinkling requires and an index already described in the literature to provide a quantitative measure of this phenomenon was built and verified with a regression model.