Landscape Evaluation

Abstract

There are many parts of the planet that have recently experienced an impressive urban development, for instance most of the Mediterranean coasts (from Spain to Italy, in Europe) and along the California coast (from San Francisco to the border with Mexico). Urbanization in general organizes the human landscape affecting structures and processes. Human population density and road distance seem two good descriptors of human landscape organization and changes. In fact, changes in land use and the way in which such changes occur can be detected by using only land cover maps combined with infrastructure maps (like road maps, urban distribution, power facilities, etc.). In human dominated landscapes, changes occur at the fringes between urban and rural land use. This represents an important ecotone along which most of the changes like fragmentation processes or, the opposite, aggregation processes can be observed.