Changes of forest communities surface in the Murge of Taranto (Puglia - Southern Italy) in the last 60 years

The Planning of Forest Community Management must be necessarily based on theknowledge of the functioning of present ecosystems, but also of relations that exist or thatoccurred in the past with the surrounding area and that led to the current disposition.In this study, changes of forest vegetation surfaces occurred in the last 60 years wereexaminated in an area extended on about 55.000 ha, located in the Murge of Taranto inPuglia (Southern Italy). It consists of the river basins that underlie the “Gravine” (ie.deep cuts in the limestone and calcarenite units in the area) of Ginosa, Laterza,Montecamplo and Castellaneta.The study began with the GIS based photo-interpretation activity of ortophotos datingback to 2006-2011, validated by field surveys, aimed at the vectorization of the differentclasses of Land Cover (Directive 2007/2/EC - artificial surfaces, agricultural areas, woodsand forests) in the studied area. For the forest vegetation it was used a classification ofphysiognomic-type composition, considering a unit digitalisation of 0,2 ha.Subsequently, the vector database obtained was compared with the aerial photo frameof 1954-55, orthorectified and georeferenced with the software Pix4dMapper. Therefore,it was possible to vectorize differences on surfaces observed, and evaluate, also on a sta-tistical basis, factors that have determined them.5