A Naturalistic Indicator of the Forest Quality and its Relationship with the Land Use Anthropentropy Factor

This paper describes a new indicator related to an important aspect of the forest landscape: the quality, expressed by the forest floristic composition, according to the phytosociological approach. Furthermore, the relationship with an existing land use indicator, the Anthropentropy Factor, is investigated. Another novelty of this research is its multidisciplinary approach: we combine the classical algorithms of computer vision systems to process the images from GIS (Geographic Information System) databases with the necessary expertise provided by the biological knowledge. The goal is to build a deep knowledge about some aspects of biodiversity preservation, by studying the impact of anthropic activities, both inside (urbanization) and outside (forests) the areas occupied by human settlements. We define two metrics to classify the levels of land use and forest quality status. The knowledge coming from the computation of the two indicators and the corresponding metrics can be used for policy actions, to guide local government decisions for biodiversity conservation in the landscape planning. The two indicators and the methodological approach are validated by presenting experimental results on a case study of a North-West area of Italy.