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The scientific research in the GPNP: landscape and ecosystem trasformations
The conservation of Alpine habitats is often threatened by the combined effect of climate change and land management (so-called land use). In the Alps, one of the most important and evident changes is natural reforestation following the abandonment of traditional agro-sylvo-pastoral practices that have maintained meadows, pastures and terraces for centuries. Over the last 70 years, and particularly rapidly between the 1950s and 1960s, many low- and medium-altitude meadows and pastures have disappeared in favour of forests and shrublands.
This process sometimes adversely affects plant and animal biodiversity, for example by disadvantaging plant and animal species that love sunny environments such as grasslands (such as flowers and pollinating insects related to them), and by trivialising the mosaic of environments that make up the landscape.
An in-depth study is currently underway in the PNGP, in collaboration with the Department of Agricultural, Forestry and Food Sciences of the University of Turin, on the dynamics between forests and grasslands over the past 70 years. The research is based on the comparison of historical aerial photographs from 1954 to the present day. Each pixel of the image is classified by artificial intelligence algorithms into categories such as ‘sparse forest’, ‘dense forest’, ‘grassland’, etc.
The comparison, sector by sector, at the scale of the entire park makes it possible to detect where changes have been most important and to correlate them in the future with agro-sylvo-pastoral activity or the population dynamics of wild animals such as ibexes and marmots.
An initial result shows that on the Piedmont side of the Park the reforestation dynamics have been much faster than on the Valle d'Aosta side, probably due to approximately double the rainfall and a more marked abandonment of the territory by man.