Irene Petrosillo

University of Salento | Unisalento · Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies (DiSTeBA)

A profound grasp of the quantitative spatial heterogeneity and distribution of the soil physicochemical attributes is crucial in understanding agricultural landscapes for ensuring the provisioning of soil ecosystem services. However, the analysis of data from remote sensing, like NDVI, can be of help in analysing the capacity of the landscape to pr...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recognize to agriculture the responsibility for about 15 % of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, contributing to global warming. The increasing nutrient inputs in industrial agriculture affect the GHG concentration in the atmosphere and varies substantially due to rate and type of fert...

Agricultural intensification and urban sprawl have led to significant alterations in riverscapes, and one of the critical consequences is the deterioration of water quality with significant implications for public health. Therefore, the objectives of this study were the assessment of the water quality of the Suquía River, the assessment of LULC cha...

An efficient and adaptive strategy within the EU Marine Spatial Planning Directive has to manage the existing and increasing conflicts between human uses and habitat conservation in coastal-marine areas. Among the different human activities developed along the coasts, aquaculture occupies a primary role. In this context, the aims of this research h...

Meta-Goal Programming (MGP) is a simultaneous cognitive evaluation of the degree of achievements for original decision goals considered in a GP model. However, in most real-world situations, environmental coefficients and related parameters are not easily available. In such a situation, the decision-maker must consider various conflicting targets i...

Among the UNCCD SDGs 2030, there is the recognition that land consumption can strongly affect the provision of ecosystem services. From the perspective of land degradation neutrality, urban level is the right scale when planning actions against land consumption. The aims of this research are: (1) to assess land consumption at urban landscape scale...

Land constitutes one of the most vital natural resources and provides the basis for human livelihood and well-being through the provision of multiple ecosystem services. Globally, land degradation occurring due to unwarranted land use/land cover change (LULC) is continuing to affect the landscape multifunctionality potential, affecting the provisio...

Agriculture is a key activity in guarantying food security, one of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN Agenda 2030 for sustainable development. However, agriculture can be an environmental impacting activity when it is managed without attention towards its environmental efficiency. Thus, the assessment of eco-efficiency in agriculture i...

Land constitutes one of the most vital natural resources and provides the basis forhuman livelihood and well-being through the provision of multiple ecosystem services.Globally, land degradation occurring due to unwarranted land use/land cover change(LULC) is continuing to affect the landscape multifunctionality potential, affecting theprovision of...

Ecological indicators are herculean contrivance for assessing management practices’ impacts on environmental changes. Soil organic carbon (SOC) potentially regulates the agricultural sustainability. Unfortunately, the SOC has been widely degraded through unsustainable land uses and agricultural practices. Hence, the efficacy of conservation tilling...

Peri-urban vegetable cropping areas, such as horticultural farms, provide several ecosystem services, such as the provision of fresh food. However, food supply must be estimated on the basis of the current and potential demand of future populations, taking into account the landscape carrying capacity towards sustainable agricultural planning. From...

Spatial heterogeneity as well as landscape services’ provision are a function of spatio-temporal scales, therefore, pattern–process relationships must be assessed at the multiple scales. In this context, this research aims at: (1) analyzing at the regional scale how pollination service can be affected by landscape heterogeneity, using two landscape...

Climate change presents the greatest challenge facing all countries of the world in the new millennium. Among others, objective 13 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims at adopting urgent measures to contrast climate change and its consequences. Part of the decline in the global growth of emissions has been the increase in using renewabl...

Soil is an essentially limited natural resource that natural and human-induced processes have both generated and damaged. Soil degradation has become one of the most crucial socio-economic and environmental problems since it produces deterioration in productivity and quality of soil resources. Soil erosion, a natural phenomenon that causes degradat...

Background: It has been recognized that urban green spaces play a crucial role in providing many landscape services. The research aimed at identifying the main knowledge gaps in this framework and to support urban planning, taking into account the spatial configuration of green areas through a pilot study area, and mapping urban landscape services....

Growing external pressures from human activities and climate change can exacerbate desertification, compromising the livelihoods of more than 25% of the world’s population. The dryland mosaic is defined by land covers that do not behave similarly, and the identification of their recurring or irregular changes over time is crucial, especially in are...

Human decisions, policies, and management strategies play an important role in structuring landscape patterns in a metropolitan area. Land-use/land-cover (LULC) changes can be considered probably the most important factor affecting the environment and the maintenance of landscape service flow. In particular, processes such as agricultural intensifi...

The contribution of soil to supporting, regulating, provisioning and cultural functions as well as its role in the ecosystem services is well-known in the international literature. However, in the domain of organic agriculture, the impact of cropping systems shifts from cereal-cereal to high-frequency diversified cropping sequences with legume as a...

Urban growth causes numerous threats to human well-being, as a consequence of the loss and degradation of urban and peri-urban green spaces. This research aims to investigate the possible role of green infrastructures (GIs), as providers of ecosystem services, in enhancing urban well-being in the 116 Italian provincial capital cities. The analysis...

Socio-environmental vulnerability to climate change in mountain landscapes depends upon multiple factors that can vary across altitude zones. However, there is limited knowledge on specific indicators suitable for assessing socio-environmental vulnerability that address altitude-related variations. This study systematically analysed important compo...

Context In the last 30 years, the number of golf courses has increased dramatically worldwide. Since no other sport occupies and manages such large areas of green space, landscape context is crucial for determining their impacts or benefits. Objectives (1) Examine how they affect the main landscape socio-environmental landscape components; (2) ana...

Conservation of biodiversity in agroecosystems is a global challenge as conversion of forest to agroecosystems has been one of the major causes for biodiversity loss through habitat transformation. The agroecosystems, especially those traditionally managed or organic, are reported to retain high biodiversity including endemic, specialists and conse...

It is known that financial insurance can address the economic impacts of a natural disaster, but some ecological aspects can play a crucial role in mitigating the overall risks for socio-ecological systems. To better strengthen the study of these relations, the aims of this paper are: (1) to analyze the main research topics of the scientific litera...

Context Socio-ecological landscapes typically characterized by non-linear dynamics in space and time are difficult to be analyzed using standard quantitative methods, due to multiple processes interacting on different spatial and temporal scales. This poses a challenge to the identification of appropriate approaches for analyzing time series that c...

Globally, agriculture is a dominant form of human use of land with agro-ecosystems covering about 40% of the terrestrial surface of the Earth. In this context, the European Union considers agriculture a key sector of the economy, recognizing, however, the related environmental implications. The aim of this paper is to examine the agricultural effic...

This work carries out a landscape analysis for the last 60years to compare the degree of preservation of two areas on the same Italian coastline characterized by different environmental protection levels: a National designated protected areas and a highly tourist coastal destination. The conversion of natural land-covers into human land uses were d...

A vast amount of knowledge and experience on coping with climatic variability and extreme weather events exists within local communities, and indigenous coping strategies are important elements of successful adaptation plans. Traditional knowledge can help to provide efficient, appropriate and time-tested ways of responding to climate change especi...

Mediterranean rangelands should be conceived as socio-ecological landscapes (SEL) because of the close interaction and coevolution between socio-economic and natural systems. A significant threat to these Mediterranean rangelands is related to uncontrolled fires that can cause potential damages due to the reduction or even the loss of ecosystems. O...

Greenhouse farming, where energy consumptions are mainly related to the greenhouses heating, is one of the sectors consuming the most energy in the agricultural industry. High costs and the uncertain availability of fossil fuels constrain the use of heating applications. Among possible solutions, the utilization of renewable heating systems such as...

The socioecological system (SES) theory sprang from the recognition of close interaction between society, in terms of social-economic system, and natural system. Human society represents the driving forces of biosphere and ecological systems. So, it is relevant to understand the human sources of ecological change. To do this, we must understand the...

We want to draw the attention to some emerging land-use cross-scale patterns resulting from social-economic factors and associated with an historical characteristic sequence of different land-use regimes that could indicate overregulation in social-ecological landscapes (SELs). We postulate that these emerging patterns with clearly defined spatial...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12707/abstract

New broader, adaptable and accommodating sets of themes have been proposed to help to identify, understand and solve sustainability problems. However, how this knowledge will foster decisions that lead to more desirable outcomes and analyses necessary to transition to sustainability remains a critical theoretical and empirical question for basic an...

One solution to mitigate climate change can be the production of renewable energy. In this context, the aims of this paper are: (1) the identification of local unsuitable areas for the installation of Utility-Scale Solar Energy (USSE) in a municipality in southern Italy; (2) the assessment of the effects of their installation on local natural CO2 s...

How an apparent static and ordered landscape condition in social ecological landscapes (SELs), can be made sustainable in terms of maintenance and improvement of the provision of ecosystem services (ESs) in face of unpredictable disturbance and change? Our contribution to the Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystem Services (MAES) working group is to a...

Local authorities have an important role in improving the quality of life of their citizens by managing environmental and social issues for a sustainable development of the territory. While an increasing number of municipalities are implementing Environmental Management Systems (ISO14001-EMAS) to manage their environmental issues, standardised tool...

This book provides a practical framework with several guidelines and best practices for making informed protected area managers to deal with the challenges associated with restoring the natural heritage of protected areas, including ecosystem services. These guidelines recognize the long term interrelationship between humans and the environment and...

Landscape sustainability can be considered in terms of order and disorder, where order implies causality, well-defined boundaries and predictable outcomes, while disorder implies uncertain causality, shifting boundaries and often unpredictable outcomes. We address the interplay of order and disorder in social–ecological landscapes (SELs) using spat...

Over the last decade we have seen an increased emphasis in environmental management and policies aimed at maintaining and restoring multiple ecosystem services at landscape scales. This emphasis has resulted from the recognition that management of specific environmental targets and ecosystem services requires an understanding of landscape processes...

In the context of new tools suitable for making local authorities more pro-active in terms of effectiveness in environmental management, this paper analyzes the case of the application of EMAS (Eco-Management and Audit Scheme) to local authorities in Italy. EMAS is a European tool that was revised in 2009 with Regulation (EC) N. 1221/2009, named EM...

Information theory and entropy measures have been extensively applied in ecology in different areas like biodiversity assessment, evolution, species interactions, spatial dynamics or landscape analysis. Ecologi-cal applications of entropy measures have been primarily focused on structural and functional complexity of systems and less attention has...

Topic Editor: Robert Costanza Citation Zurlini, G., Jones, K.B., Li, L., & Petrosillo, I. (2010). Potentials of ecosystem service accounting at multiple scales. Retrieved from http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/51cbeea87896bb431f6996a0

Environmental security, as the opposite of environmental vulnerability (fragility), is multi-layered, multi-scale and complex, existing in both the objective physical, biological, and social realm, and the subjective realm of individual human perception. In this paper, we detect and quantify the scales and spatial patterns of human land use as ecos...

Understanding natural capital vulnerability in social–ecological landscapes (SELs) requires understanding how the actions of humans as a keystone species shape the environment across a range of scales in a panarchy of SELs taking into account the scales and patterns of human land use as ecosystem disturbances. We detect and quantify the scales and...

Topic Editor: Robert Costanza Citation Zurlini, G., Jones, K., Li, L., & Petrosillo, I. (2010). Potentials of ecosystem service accounting at multiple scales. Retrieved from http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/51cbeea87896bb431f6996a0

In situations with opposing opinions, strong emotions, and high stakes, as it might occur, for instance, in tourism-based social– ecological systems (SESs) between the conflicting interests of mass-tourists and eco-tourists, small events can have large unexpected consequences (Patterson, 2002). This behaviour is called deterministic chaos (Wheeler,...

The identification of areas worthy of protection and their subsequent institution as natural parks are instruments that society uses to preserve biodiversity that, by supporting Natural Capital Flow (NCF), represents a guarantee for the maintenance of human life quality. However, the implemented strategies for the conservation of biodiversity may d...

A new definition of environmental security gives equal importance to the objective and subjective assessments of environmental risk. In this framework, the management of tourist harbors has to take into account managers' perceptions. The subject of the present study is a tourist harbor in southern Italy where six different managers are present. Thi...

The management of tourist harbors has traditionally been analyzed with little attention to managers' awareness of the effects of their decisions on the environment. The aims of this paper were to assess managers' perceptions of the main environmental risks in their regions and to identify common behaviors among the managers involved in eight touris...

The maintenance of ecosystem goods and services, i.e. natural capital, is the basic guarantee of environ-mental security that aims to evaluate the level of threats to the actual flux of natural capital. This research concerns a natural protected area in southern Italy and aims at (1) assessing the temporal dynamics of land-use and land-cover mosaic...

Few ecosystems are free of extensive human influence. Landscapes change constantly from natural and anthropogenic drivers, and land use and land cover changes by humans have been identified as a primary effect of humans on natural systems. These changes underlie fragmentation and habitat loss, which are the greatest threats to biodiversity and ecos...

A fundamental shift in ecological thinking mediated by complex systems theory centers on the change in perception of systems from static entities in equilibrium to complex entities dynamic across time and space. The centrality of disturbance and the contingency of the consequent course of system evolution bring history to the fore, urging a retrosp...

Land-use change is one of the major factors affecting global environmental change and represents a primary human effect on natural systems. Taking into account the scales and patterns of human land uses as source/sink disturbance systems, we describe a framework to characterize and interpret the spatial patterns of disturbances along a continuum of...

An accepted goal of conservation is to build a conservation network that is resilient to environmental change. The conceptual patch-corridor-matrix model views individual conservation areas as connected components of a regional network capable of sustaining metapopulations and biodiversity, and assessment of contextual conditions in the matrix surr...

The maintenance of ecosystem services is the basic guarantee of environmental security that, in an objective sense, aims to evaluate the level of threats to actual acquired goods and services and, in a subjective sense, the level of consciousness and fear that such services will be attacked and possibly lost. To this purpose the aim of this researc...

Environmental security, as the opposite of environmental fragility (vulnerability), is multilayered, multi-scale and complex, existing in both the objective realm of biophysics and society, and the subjective realm of individual human perception. For ecological risk assessments (ERAs), the relevant objects of environmental security are social-ecolo...

Landscape sciences emphasize the importance of spatial pattern and scale in determining the relative degree of environmental security. The primary hypothesis of the landscape sciences is that spatial pattern and distribution of biotic and abiotic attributes of the environment, including people, are important determinants of landscape processes and...

Managing Socio-Ecological Landscapes (SELs) for environmental security implies the recognition that social systems interact with ecological systems, and requires new strategies to improve environmental policies, in light of the mismatch between existing global management capacity and likely threats to environmental resources. This because mismanage...

The growing knowledge about environmental change, stress, and degradation has increased the visibility of environmental condition as an important determinant of security, especially given the emergence of new political, economic, social, and environmental challenges since the end of the cold war. The relationship between environment and security no...

The analysis of socio-ecological systems requires new, qualitatively distinct, evaluation schemes and appropriate investigation tools that enable an integrated assessment of ecological, social, and economic factors since human land use is a major force driving land-scape change, landscape dynamics can be better understood in the context of complex...

We describe a framework to characterize and interpret the spatial patterns of disturbances at multiple scales in socio-ecological systems. Domains of scale are defined in pattern metric space and mapped in geographic space, which can help to understand how anthropogenic disturbances might impact biodiversity through habitat modification. The approa...