Il monitoraggio delle risorse forestali in ambiente Mediterraneo mediante dati telerilevati

Monitoring forest resources in Mediterranean environment by using remote sensing techniques. Since the Neolithic pastoralism has palyed a major role in the Mediterranean basin; during the last century the increased antrophic pressure on Mediterranean ecosystems (overgrazing, fires, the overcultivation of unsuitable areas) has led to severe land degration phenomena. The typical Mediterranean forestry ecosystem have undergone a progressive and steady degradation, resulting in a very fragmented and heterogeneous landscapes. In this context monitoring forest resources at regional scale represents a major issue towards the identification of areas threatened by land degradation where mitigation actions have to be carried out. Remote sensing is a powerful tool for monitoring forest and natural resources due to its synoptic and multitemporal haracteristics. The heterogeneity of vegetation cover due to vegetation regrowth after disturbances due to overgrazing or fires (presence of formations changing from pasture to macchia in continous) make complex the use of the traditional classification techniques of remote sensed images. In the present work the preliminary results obtained by the application of traditional and innovating procedures for the classification of the land cover (Maximum Likelihood Classification, Spectral Mixture Analysis) over an area in central-eastern Sardinia are presented.