Scots pine forest in the NW Italian Alps. What has changed in the last 50 years?

Pure Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) stands occupy an area of more than 28,000 hectares in the western Italian Alps (Aosta Valley and Piedmont). The purpose of this study was to describe forest spatio-temporal dynamics over the last 50 years compared to the land-use change and to analyse the role of the Scots pine in two different ecoregions: intermediate and internal Alps. In each site an area of about 4000 ha was selected and, following orthorectification and preprocessing, historical aerial photographs (1954, 2000) were analysed. Multiresolution segmentation and object-oriented classification methods were used in order to derive land use maps from the photos. Forest landscape structure has been analysed by means of landscape metrics and relations between topographic features, demographic density, land use changes were assessed.