Changes in Land-Cover/Land-Use Pattern in the Fortore River Basin (Southern Italy) and Morphodynamic Implications

In Southern Italy, studies dealing with the analysis of multidecadal land-use/land-cover (LULC) changes at the basin scale are scarce. This is an important gap, considering the deep interrelationships between LULC, soil erosion, and river and coastal dynamics. This study provides a contribution in filling this gap by analyzing the LULC patterns and changes in an area of southern Italy, i.e., the Fortore River basin, which occurred between 1960 and 2018. To this end, we conducted a GIS-aided comparison and analysis of LULC data from 1960, 1990, and 2018, respectively. The LULC changes were analyzed at both the basin and the physiographic unit scale. The results showed that most of the LULC changes occurred between the 1960s and 1990s, while from the 1990s onward, great stability in LULC was evident in the basin. The obtained data were mostly coherent with national-, regional-, and basin-scale trends, although some scale-dependent discrepancies were noted. The river and shoreline dynamics fully reflected the duration and the amount of phases of the changes in LULC stability at the basin scale.