Historic Agricultural Landscape Characterization: First Attempt of Historic Landscape Characterization (HLC) to Costa Viola Terraced Landscape (Calabria, Italy)

By its own definition, the landscape is a constantly changing entity because of the continuous interactions between nature and human factors. These interactions are synthetically represented by land use land cover (LU/LC) changes. The main object of this study is to analyze changes that occurred for almost 60 years, from 1955 to 2014. The study object is the historic agricultural terraced landscape of the Costa Viola (Southern Italy). This landscape is important because of its status as a protected landscape, listed by UNESCO. The resulting landscape configuration was analyzed, highlighting how yesterday’s landscape influenced the current landscape. Several different years have been analyzed and LU/LC maps have been digitalized for each investigated year. In order to highlight the steps that led to the development of today’s landscape, the obtained polygons have been overlapped, obtaining a vector with all occurred changes. The proposed approach wants to identify the time when this LU/LC appears for the first period, the so-called first occurrence, highlighting how the past influences landscape composition. This is the common approach of the historic landscape characterisation (HLC) and historic land-use assessment (HLA), two very similar methods whose aim is to study today’s landscape and how it has originated.