Andrea De Montis

Università degli Studi di Sassari | UNISS · Department of Agriculture

Although climate change adaptation (CCA) and spatial planning are relevant to promoting climate resilience, Italy shows a certain lack of studies focused on the coherence between national CCA objectives and sectoral plans. We aim to investigate such a research gap and propose and apply a logical framework approach (LFA)-based method to assess the c...

In the last decades, safeguard and management of environment and landscape have been acknowledged as priority to recover degraded habitats and reduce biodiversity loss. Anthropogenic landscape fragmentation (LF) -due to settlements and transport and mobility infrastructures- leads to smaller and more isolated habitat patches and can jeopardize both...

Excessive anthropogenic activities affect landscape patterns and trigger a decrease of natural capital and the level of quality of life. Green infrastructures (GIs) are commonly accepted by scholars as solutions for restoring degraded areas and providing a variety of ecosystem services (ESs). The other way around, the capacity to deliver ESs can be...

European spatial planners deal with two major concerns: adaptation to climate changes (ACC) and the design and management of green infrastructures (GIs). ACC calls for the renewal of spatial planning with constant appeals to the need to adequately prepare for extreme climate events. GIs deliver ecosystem services (ES), which consist of beneficial f...

Climate change is a concerning phenomenon worldwide. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is the core of the mitigation strategies that are effective countermeasures to address a changing climate in the long term. Nevertheless, the need for short-term solutions regarding adaptation to climate change (ACC) has gained growing interest in the sci...

Adaptation to climate change and sustainable development have become core elements of international, European, and national policies and strategies. At worst, adaptation to climate change can trigger negative responses—maladaptation—in terms of raising greenhouse-gas emissions and exacerbating the vulnerability of specific groups of people, which b...

The decline of natural capital resulting from urbanization has triggered phenomena such as landscape fragmentation and loss of biodiversity. European institutions have published documents and strategies with the purpose of counteracting such phenomena. In this regard, in 2020 the European Commission released the European Biodiversity Strategy 2030,...

Climate changes exert negative impacts on the global environments and the human beings. They imply more frequent extreme weather events, which are responsible of sea level rise, coastal erosion, flooding, droughts, and desertification. Mitigation and adaptation represent intertwined strategies for counteracting climate changes. Mitigation is associ...

Extensive urbanization is a major cause of landscape fragmentation, depletes natural habitats and affects climate change. An efficient counteraction is offered by the realization of green infrastructures (GIs). GIs contribute to ecological connectivity, increase ecosystem resilience, address climate change, and improve people’s wellbeing. The inclu...

In this study, we measure the resilience of the road networks in two Mediterranean regions: Valencia (Spain) and Sardinia (Italy). We apply a framework that is able to monitor the deterioration in territorial accessibility of the two systems in response to the cumulative elimination of sections. Road sections are removed according to different elim...

Today, major landscape changes affect ecological connectivity exerting adverse effects on ecosystems. Connec-tivity is a critical element of landscape structure and supports ecosystem functionality. Landscape connectivity can be efficiently increased in landscape ecology by building ecological networks (EN) through models mimicking the interaction...

Composite indicators (CIs), i.e., combinations of many indicators in a unique synthetizing measure, are useful for disentangling multisector phenomena. Prominent questions concern indicators’ weighting, which implies time-consuming activities and should be properly justified. Landscape fragmentation (LF), the subdivision of habitats in smaller and...

Since the 1960s, a significant percentage of railway networks have been closed all over the world. This represents a heritage that can be used to provide new features to local communities with regard to sustainable development and landscape regeneration processes. Disused railways can be converted into greenways which are only dedicated to not moto...

The assessment and management of landscape fragmentation (LF), i.e., the subdivision of the habitat into smaller and more isolated patches, can benefit from the adoption of a composite indicator explaining, in a unique measure, the various concerns involved. However, the use of composite indicators may be affected by lack of data, subjectivity in a...

The importance of collaboration among peers in science is widely investigated: an essential issue is the relevance of credits shared among scholars for the good faith and cooperation in research projects. Despite its significance, so far in Italy the usefulness of collaboration in research activities is not taken in due consideration by both scient...

Adaptation to climate change means adjustment of human and natural systems to climatic actual or expected events, in order to minimize damage or maximize benefit. Adaptation implies involvement, coordination, and cooperation of different actors and sectors. Multi-actor collaboration usually characterizes the drafting of regional plans, which act as...

Resilience is an overarching concept concerning the capacity of complex systems to react to severe crisis by self-organization, innovation and learning and to attain more robust settings than in the original condition. While the theory on resilience has exploded in the last decades, its operationalization is less practiced. A possible way out is th...

Landscape fragmentation (LF) is the process where habitat patches tend to become smaller and more isolated over time. It is mainly due to human activities and affects habitats, biodiversity, ecosystem balance, and ecological networks. Transport and mobility infrastructures and urbanized areas—also in the form of suburban and rural sprawl—contribute...

Landscape fragmentation, i.e. the process where large habitat patches become smaller and more isolated, has often been accelerated by human activities, such as deforestation, agricultural land conversion, and urbanisation of natural areas. Transport and mobility infrastructures are a major cause of landscape fragmentation. The Infrastructural Fragm...

Ecological networks (ENs), i.e. compounds of a set of patches interconnected through a set of corridors, are major strategies for counteracting landscape fragmentation in stressed urban, peri-urban and rural domains. They are adopted in many cases worldwide and their success or difficult rooting can be used as a living indicator of the inclination...

Le reti ecologiche si possono classificare tra i dispositivi territoriali atti a garantire la connettività funzionale e spaziale tra le componenti ambientali e del paesaggio, assicurandone la continuità di flusso nelle matrici e contrastando i processi di frammentazione. Queste strategie stanno trovando ampie applicazioni in particolar modo nelle f...

Defragmentation, i.e. the systematic action of reconnecting even smaller and more isolated landscape patches, is a major concern for landscape analysists and planners. Landscape fragmentation (LF) can jeopardize both ecosystem continuity and quality. Transport and mobility infrastructures (TMIs) are considered one of the main causes of LF and trigg...

Maintaining ecosystem continuity has become a central element in spatial planning policies. Several authors acknowledge the environmental, also known as landscape, fragmentation due to human action as one of the main causes which have negative effects on biodiversity. The phenomenon consists of the transformation of larger patches of habitat in sma...

According to a worldwide well-known attitude, also in Italy, the assessment of scientific production in the last decades has been progressively based on the analysis of the impact through bibliometric variables. Various data sets, such as Scopus by Elsevier and Web of Science by Thomson Reuters, are designed and maintained to index a steadily incre...

The implementation of the European Landscape Convention has paved the way for innovative tools able to analyse scattered and medium-small size elements, far beyond the usual isolated relevant landmarks. In this context, planners have been confronted with the problem of defining those characteristics of rural landscapes which are typical of agricult...

The effective application of SEA is still limited and needs to be steered through the dissemination of enhanced guidance documents. In this respect, administrative bodies in charge of SEA management have issued guidelines and manuals in order to address the major difficulties that hinder SEA implementation in the day-to-day practice. In this study,...

Transport and mobility plans imply strategies and actions that affect the environment. The European Union has introduced in 2001 the strategic environmental assessment (SEA) to take into account and mitigate adverse environmental effects in planning and decision-making. SEA limited implementation has attracted the interest of many scholars that hav...

The assessment of the performance of planning is debated. The evaluation of the conformance of a given national planning system with a set of principles is similarly received with critical and favourable remarks. A relevant case study consists of the conformance of European landscape planning practice with the principles of the European Landscape C...

Introduzione La recente attenzione della pianificazione delle aree di margine tra insediamento urbano e aree rurali è concentrata nello sviluppo di modelli e strategie per fornire risposte operative dove le pressioni e le interferenze tra aree antropiche e naturali sono più forti. L'espansione delle città si traduce spesso in una perdita di biodive...

Introduzione La recente attenzione della pianificazione delle aree di margine tra insediamento urbano e aree rurali è concentrata nello sviluppo di modelli e strategie per fornire risposte operative dove le pressioni e le interferenze tra aree antropiche e naturali sono più forti. L’espansione delle città si traduce spesso in una perdita di biodive...

The “albergo diffuso” (scattered hotel) is a typical Italian tourism system, introduced for the first time in the early 1980s by the Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. It is a tourist accommodation management system that is able to deliver the services of a full hotel, by lodging clients in accommodation created in and around existing hous...

The aim of spatial autocorrelation is to inspect the organization and structure of spatial phenomena. This statistical method allows one to scrutinize spatial patterns and relationships that generate relevant phenomena in territories under consideration. In fact, spatial phenomena are often self-determining and may positively or negatively influenc...

Since the early 1970s, rural tourism has been adopted in southern Europe as a strategy able to reduce depopulation and unemployment of small and underdeveloped rural settlements. The Council of European Union has issued the regulation (EC) 1257/1999 on the support of rural development by means of the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fun...

The Italian administrative bodies and planning agencies have embraced with mixed feedbacks the introduction of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) through the European Directive 2001/42/EC. Concurrently, regional and local spatial planning practice have been characterized by a new approach inspired by landscape planning. The Italian region of...

Academic literature has been continuously growing at such a pace that it can be difficult to follow the progression of scientific achievements; hence, the need to dispose of quantitative knowledge support systems to analyze the literature of a subject. In this article we utilize network analysis tools to build a literature review of scientific docu...

Urban-rural landscape planning research is nowadays focusing on strategies and tools that support practitioners in designing integrated spaces starting from the analysis of local areas, where human and natural pressures interfere. A prominent framework is provided by the ecological networks, whose design regards the combination of a set of green ar...

This paper represents the continuation, i.e. Part B, of an homonymous paper aiming at designing an ecological network for the periurban area on the town of Nuoro in central Sardinia. While in Part A we illustrate the methodological premises and introduce a spatial network analysis-based study of a pilot ecological network, in this paper we apply a...

The European Directive 2001/42/EC (Directive) has introduced the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), a procedure for assessing the effects of certain plans and programs on the environment. The Directive has been transposed in different ways and times within Europe: member states have frequently drawn up guidelines to facilitate SEA implementa...

This paper presents an assessment of the effects of the European Landscape Convention (ELC), a treaty signed more than a decade ago, on national landscape planning systems, with special reference to planning policies and tools. While the ELC has been formally ratified by the majority of the states involved, its actual implementation has varied thro...

SEA has been applied in different ways in EU energy and environmental planning instruments, because different member states have interpreted European Directive 2001/42/CE in a variety of ways. Italy, for example, has only recently completed the integration of the directive into its legislation, through a number of decrees which were approved betwee...

The development of a region is affected, inter alia, by concepts linked to the ability to displace and reach other locations (accessibility) efficiently and to lagging economic conditions connected to contemporary countryside activities (rurality). These topics and their relationships have attracted the interest of scholars who have scrutinized the...

"In the last years, we acknowledge a great scientific interest on complex network analysis, a method able to characterise systems with very large numbers of entities (the nodes or vertices) interlaced by a series of connections/relationships (the links or edges). The objects of analyses as such are biological (predator-pray); information (internet)...

The late formal tradition of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) European Directive into the Italian planning system has so far induced a variety of behaviour of administrative bodies and planning agencies involved. In Italy and Sardinia, a new approach to landscape planning is characterizing spatial planning practice from the regional to the...

Constant presence of at least one operator in livestock buildings for broilers would allow a perfect control of animal behaviour and, especially, deviations in feeding and drinking patterns, in the perspective of a high welfare status. However, as nowadays it is impossible for a farmer to be present in the farm all day long, automatic monitoring sy...

After more than a decade from the publication of the European Directive 2001/42/CE (Directive) on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), the design and construction of the interested spatial planning instruments has gone through a variety of changes and integrations in European and in world states. This inhomogeneous panorama can be explained wi...

Constant presence of at least one operator in livestock buildings for broilers would allow a perfect control of animal behaviour and, especially, deviations in feeding and drinking patterns, in the perspective of a high welfare status. However, as nowadays it is impossible for a farmer to be present in the farm all day long, automatic monitoring sy...

The late formal tradition of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) European Directive into the Italian planning system has so far induced a variety of behaviour of administrative bodies and planning agencies involved. In Italy and Sardinia, a new approach to landscape planning is characterizing spatial planning practice from the regional to the...

Land-use change in Sardinia is a delicate problem. On the one hand, the Regional Landscape Plan, the main landscape-planning tool adopted on the island, pays great attention to landscape protection, using strict constraints and directives for land management. On the other hand, the Regional Energy Plan aims at the diversification of energy sources...

Recently practitioners are approaching spatial and environmental planning by adopting methods and tools drawn from Complexity Science. The strength of these methods is not only apparent in their systemic coherence but also in their capacity to consider a variety of components as a whole system. Given this background, the aim of this paper is to app...

Recent approaches in landscape planning have prompted interest in the relationships among cultural goods, human settlements, and the environment. In Europe and Italy, scholars and practitioners have used landscape planning tools for the analysis and management of historical landscapes that include elements such as the sense of belonging of local so...

In this paper a contribution is presented with respect to accessibility indicators modelling for commuters moving through the municipalities of Sardinia, in Italy. In this case, spatial complex network analysis is integrated into the construction of accessibility measures: one of the most relevant outcomes of the first tool -the detection of shorte...

A major issue for policy makers and planners is the definition of the "ideal" regional partition, i.e. the delimitation of sub-regional domains showing a sufficient level of homogeneity with respect to some specific territorial features. In Sardinia, the second major island in the Mediterranean sea, politicians and analysts have been involved in a...

Complex networks theory allows researchers to deal with systems characterised by uncertainty and unpredictability. It also enables investigating interactions between transport networks and their topology. Recently it has been used to analyse socio-economic processes in urban, regional, and environmental planning. In the light of these advances, the...

Geneletti D., Abdullah A. (Eds.), Spatial decision support for urban and environmental planning: a collection of case studies . Kuala Lumpur: Arah Pendidikan Publishers, 2009. VI, 170 p.: ill., maps. ISBN 9789833718535

We study the patterns of the communities of workers and students in the italian insular regions, by applying grouping methodologies based on the characterization of the commuter's movements as a complex weighted network. In order the get the community structure we apply an algorithm based on the maximization of the weighted modularity that allows u...

This study analyzes the inter-municipal commuting systems of the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily, employing weighted network analysis technique. Based on the results obtained for the Sardinian commuting network, the network analysis is used to identify similarities and dissimilarities between the two systems.

The emerging new science of networks is providing an elegant paradigm for the characterization of the broad area of complex systems. New research perspectives have been opened in the study of many real phenomena and processes, and recently fields like urban, regional, and environmental sciences have gained new insights from the tools provided by ne...

Warming-up of the planet and scarcity of conventional energy resources has led to aim of reducing the consumption of fossil fuels and the development of innovative renewable technologies for energy production. However, innovations and investments in renewable energy can encounter resistance of local communities. This makes planning for the developm...

Contemporary planners are often confronted with the issue of recovering settlements which rose as a necessary complement of former productive activities and nowadays have lost their original functions. In particular, mining entrepreneurship throughout Europe has produced during the last century remarkable effects on the built and natural environmen...

We study the structure of the network representing the interurban commuting traffic of the Sardinia region, Italy, which amounts to 375 municipalities and 1 600 000 inhabitants. We use a weighted network representation in which vertices correspond to towns and the edges correspond to the actual commuting flows among those towns. We characterize qua...

The paper presents a tentative framework for Planning Support System (PSS) design. The aim is to aid planners to fully exploit the potential offered by the introduction of Spatial Information Technology into planning practice. The framework proposed is based on a taxonomy of PSSs, which offers different conceptual models useful to adapt a general P...

This special issue explores the evolution of the environmental management in a permanently changing scenario, where many interested parties meet with the purpose of realising their goals and finding solutions or compromises. Against this complex background, environmental scientists and planners have increasingly become aware of the need for decisio...

In this paper, experimentation is proposed where multicriteria analysis is integrated with distributed computing within an interactive evaluation process. The technicalities of the application are introduced by some philosophical background remarks on the dynamics of communicative processes, which characterise current digital age. This paper is two...

A variety of phenomena can be explained by means of a description of the features of their underlying network structure. In addition, a large number of scientists (see the reviews, eg. Barabasi, 2002; Watts, 2003) demonstrated the emergence of large-scale properties common to many different systems. These various results and studies led to what can...

Abstract: We present the analysis of the inter-municipal commuting network of the Island of Sardinia, Italy. The logical and the physical network properties are investigated through several characterizing measures and discussed in relation with socio-economic and traffic emerging characteristics of Sardinia. The analysis presented here might repres...

En la UE se ha estimado que los costes de la congesti�n representan el 2% de su PIB y que el coste de la poluci�n del aire y ruido supera el 0,6% del PIB, siendo alrededor del 90% de los mismos ocasionados por el transporte terrestre. Ante este hecho y el continuo aumento de la demanda del transporte privado frente al p�blico para los desplazamient...

In the last decade, and especially since 1995, when the Internet started its widespread diffu-sion, Distributed Geographic Information (DGI) technologies have a rapid exponentially developed because of the enormous growth of the "network of the networks". Online GIS started to appear on the web, and soon they multiplied their number. Many organizat...

In the last decades researchers have emphasized the link between evaluation and planning, as an indispensable component in seeking reasonable and balanced choices for regional planning and economic policy. According to these scholars, evaluation becomes part of planning throughout the whole process of policy preparation. Multicriteria analysis (MCA...

In this study, the authors compare two inter-municipal commuting networks (MCN) pertaining to the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily, by approaching their characterization through a weighted network analysis. They develop on the results obtained for the MCN of Sardinia (De Montis et al. 2007) and attempt to use network analysis as a mean of det...

The complexity of Regional Planning System characterized, as in Italy, by a top down ap-proach often requires reliable tools of analysis and problem setting in supporting decision-making. The implementation of a Geographic Information System for the wide area planning system analysis could lead to evaluate existing plans and better understand the u...