Monitoring Biodiversity at a Wide Land Scale to SupportSustainable Planning and Policy: The Proposal of a KeyIndicator Based on Vegetation Cover Data Deriving fromMaps.

Increasing biodiversity beyond the site scale is now required. Planning tools have to be able to monitor biodiversity level at the land scale as to decide how and where to intervene. Nowadays there are some key biodiversity indicators suggested by the main international associations. These indicators measure the presence or absence of an area under national or state park control. They measure a de jure situation and this is considered a limit. This paper presents a simple methodology to evaluate the biodiversity level, starting from the vegetation cover land classification (pasture lands, rural lands, different types of forests…) where forest represents one of the best performance in biodiversity. Forest cover is considered a good indicator for biodiversity or for biodiversity start up. The methodology, fitted for planning issues first, has been tested on the plain area of Lombardia where now the regional government, with the scientific support given by a scientific committee, is planning ten new large forests. One of the strengths of this planning methodology is its easy application at the land scale, thanks to the use of data coming from GIS-map where land covers and destinations have been signed for the whole plain area. This indicator is a useful tool for policy and planning issues and aims due to the availability of data and its easy application. The results, at the beginning and, surely, to improve, encourage the applications and give a better outputs than other key indicators like, for instance, the OECD indicators for biodiversity monitoring: in the paper it will be offered a comparison between the two monitoring indicators at the wide scale. Keywords: Biodiversity; indicator; forest; land cover; planning, decision making, GIS, botanic types.