Nuovi paradigmi per le reti ecologiche: definizione di una metodologia GIS per l’analisi territoriale finalizzata all’individuazione e alla gestione di reti ecologiche alla scala del paesaggio

The thesis belongs to the concpetual foreground of territorial policies and planning practices for biodiversity conservation, focusing in the ecological network as a model useful in landscape planning. Ecological networks concept, attractive for its semplicity and intelligibility, leaves a real sense of imprecision and impracticability that motivate the need for a deep re-thinking of its foundamenal paradigms. This is the target of the research. The aim is to define a new GIS framework for planning capable to integrate in the latest advances in the theoretical landscape ecology, for a refinement of ecological network model towards a best integration in planning. Categorical representation of landscapes has heavily influenced the dominant paradigm (patch-matrix model) recognized meaningful in describing ecologicl processes. The inadequacy of this paradimg is the foundamental hypothesis of this research. The recognition of a complex system of hidden assumptions is demonstrated to be the real cause of failure for the ecologcal network concept and model for landscape planning. Furthermore a new theoretical development in landscape ecology (the landscape gradient model) was recognized as the new potential tool to redraw a unexplored relational domain between planning and ecology based on a process-based point of view. Thanks to recent development in GIS techniques a methodological proposal, aiming to demonstrate the skills of this new approach in facing planning problems, is presented.