An instrument to assess the agro-ecological value of the Lombardia plain (Northern Italy) from land-cover cartography: preliminary results

The paper presents the preliminary results of the project ‘An environmental information system to estimate the agro-ecological value of the land cover in the Lombardy plain’, aimed to monitor and assess the agro-ecological value of a heavily human impacted landscape. The idea of the project derives from the need of a cartographic product, based on reliable and spatially explicit indicators, to be used as support to land use planning and environmental decision-making processes. The proposed methodology is driven by an operational approach and is based on information gathered from land-use/cover databases. The paper proposes a set of indicators selected to assess the different aspects of the agro-environment and shows a method to visually synthesize the multiple information, summarizing the agro-ecological value of a territory at landscape level.