Ecological State Evaluation of a Rural Landscape Revealing the Importance of Naturalised and Organic Crop Fields

This study understood the ecological state of an agrarian landscape, by performing the tools and indicators proposed by the “Landscape Bionomics” (LB) discipline. The tested principles and methods offer a systemic approach to study environmental problems at different scales (i.e. crop, field, farm and landscape) and to promote the rehabilitation of compromised areas. The methodology distinguishes specific landscape elements according to their functions, which can be exclusive like human habitats (e.g. productive, residential, subsidiary) and natural habitats (e.g. source, resistant, stabilising, geologic), or in common between these two (e.g. protective, resilient, connective). Using LB, we assessed the impact of anthropic factors on a rural area (15km² in the South Milan Agricultural Park in Lombardy Region, Italy) in a 62 years timespan (data from 1954, 1999 and 2016). The overall results highlighted that anthropic activity impacts are more strongly on landscape functions: A. The productive (Crop Fields) B. The resistant (Woods) C. The protective (Tree Rows) Moreover, the temporal reconstruction described an altered ecological state in the entire timespan, with further degradation in the last 17 years. However, at the farm scale, we observed that the resistant, the protective and some productive apparatuses (In particular permanent meadows and organic fields) play an ecological role of potential compensation for landscape fragmentation and urbanisation.