Historical ecology and sustainable forest management: revealing key periods in the landscape transformation of the Italian peninsula

In recent years, palaeoecological analyses are increasingly widespread in various environments and are sometimes developed with particularly detailed temporal resolution providing historical ecology a new multidisciplinary focus (Hjelle et al. 2012; Izdebski et al. 2016). The possibility to compare the dynamics of local and regional landscapes at the decadal scale with climatic reconstructions, historical documents and archaeological data is confirming the long and pervasive land transformation of the Anthropocene (e.g. Marignani et al. 2017; Piovesan et al. in press), and providing alternative scenarios of some classical views derived strictly from interpretation of historical documents (Schoolman et al. in press). The aim of this contribution is to discuss what unites and what differentiates the historical landscape evolution along peninsular Italy on the basis of the available multidisciplinary records. ... Across all records we examined in Italy, there is a dominant pattern of widespread loss of forest ecosystems and an increase in forest degradation/pioneer communities in modern landscapes as compared with ancient landscapes. While this result is not surprising, the pattern of continuous change with a dominant trend of degradation of forest ecosystems and natural capital raises important questions about the need for future plans of forest management and ecosystem restoration for biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services and renewable products. The paleoecological data can provide critical baseline data for potential restoration efforts. The highest priority for ecosystem restoration is in the lowland wet environments.