Biodiversity Conservation: Geosynphytosociology as a Tool of Analysis and Modelling of Grassland Systems

The study site is located along the Umbria-Marches Apennine (central Italy). Following a series of research topics, the aims and objectives of this paper are to present the tested process of forage resources modelling at a large scale in a pastoral system in order to define essential management and decision making aimed on biodiversity conservation.

The analytical process is based on correlation between phytosociological and agro-zootechnical analysis. This approach allows one to extend any type of heterogeneous data, provided this is in any way correlated to the intrinsic characteristics of the plant community, can be interpolated to the whole polygon and therefore to all polygons referring to the same phytosociological unit. In terms of planning and application, the results of phytosociological modelling are much more useful when integrated in a database (GIS), in which the different information levels, based on hierarchical criteria, are simulated in multiple polygon segmentations.

In particular, this method allows one to obtain a first general overview of the forage resource using the theoretical data linked to the phytosociological interpretation of the territory. Subsequently, this overview can be enhanced with actual quantitative data, offering also a qualitative dimension coming from the phytosociological aspects.