Classification of Landscape Sensitivity in the Territory of Cremona: Finalization of Indicators and Thematic Maps in GIS Environment

1.1. Methodology and Operating Basis

In recent times the concept of landscape has been considered not only in the simple natural/environmental way. Both international and Italian national and regional laws have identified, over time, a number of complex factors to be considered for the identification of landscape structural elements.

According to such ideas, preliminary steps to achieve a landscape sensitivity map for Cremona, have been focused on:

• 1.

  Understanding the peculiarity of settlement and environmental contexts, analyzing planning documents at local and regional scale;

• 2.

  Collecting and preparing the corresponding GIS map layers.

After the formalization of knowledge kept, a methodological/procedural scheme has been developed for highlighting the symbiosis between spatial information used to build thematic indicators, and the subsequent production of homogeneous areas for events thematic characterization and entity (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Methodological/procedural scheme

1.2. Building Survey Statistical Units

During the preliminary operations of thematic indicators assessment, it turned out to be crucial to build survey units (Fabbris, 1997) to which connecting the information collected, depending on the subsequent treatment with dedicated GIS software and, later on, with geostatistical applications in AddaWin environment. Concerning different analyses, it was considered appropriate to operate at two different scales: in order to investigate exclusive events of suburban areas, continuous dimension survey units were considered, identifying, by processes resulting from landscape ecology, landscape units (UDP) generated by the conformation of natural and anthropic elements, setting barriers of different degree of intensity; vice versa, all other events in the study area were analyzed adopting a grid of cells of 25 m side, assigning to each of them the information derived from both complex analysis made in continuous geometries, and other analyses.