Rural buildings and landscape fragmentation: measure and interpretation

The European Landscape Convention has opened a new perspective about the study of landscape, acknowledging the importance of natural, rural, peri-urban, and urban landscapes, including degraded and high quality landscapes across the European context. In order to achieve a best quality in protection, management, and planning proposals, all policies should take into account the landscape dimension. Landscape quality is strongly affected by human actions, and the need to fulfill the human needs has had tremendous negative effects on habitats, with a considerable biodiversity loss in the last decades. Negative effects include landscape fragmentation (LF) which is closely related to transformation of natural areas for human use. Urbanization has effects on ecological networks and causes fragmentation processes and soil consumption, which produce qualitative and quantitative effects on habitat, flora, and fauna. LF caused by urban development can be assessed through indices such as the urban fragmentation index (UFI) which has encountered some interest in research. Also suburban and rural sprawl can increase the level of LF and decrease natural and semi-natural habitat area. Suburban and rural sprawl are different from each other: the first one shows a higher housing density than the second one. However, rural sprawl affects much larger areas than suburban sprawl, with wider negative environmental effects. In this study we aim to quantify the LF in rural areas in six landscape units of Sardinia, Italy. In this work, we propose and apply an UFI-based rural buildings fragmentation index (RBFI) taking into account the interplay between rural buildings and their surrounding landscape. In detail, we aim to quantify the level of LF through the RBFI, stress the main critical issues, and propose the next steps of the research.