ABRESO – ABandonment and REbound: SOcietal views on landscape- and land-use change and their impacts on water and soils
ABRESO is an international Belmont Forum project funded by the Department of Earth Sciences and Environmental Technologies (DSTTA). The project aims to create a transdisciplinary platform for understanding the natural and socioeconomic factors that lead to land abandonment and the resulting land-use changes and alterations to ecosystem processes in the Critical Zone. The results of the activities carried out over the three years of the project (2021-2023) will enable stakeholders to apply solutions for the sustainable management of the air-soil-vegetation-and-water system.
The project involves the United States, Japan, Taiwan, France, and Italy, with the CNR IGG, IRET, IIA, and IRCrES research institutes and the University of Pavia.
In Italy, three mountain areas in the Alpine region have been selected: the Gran Paradiso (Noaschetta) and Val Grande national parks, and the Tesino area. The project's stakeholders in Italy are the Gran Paradiso and Val Grande National Parks, UNCEM, municipalities in the Tesino area, farmers, and tourists.
These areas, traditionally used for grazing and agriculture, have been progressively abandoned since the 1960s, resulting in uncontrolled reforestation of pastures and terraces.
The Italian team intends to evaluate, in areas with diverse lithological substrates, the effects of induced land-use changes on carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling (chemical and isotopic characterization of C and N in soils and vegetation, CO2fluxes ) and on plant biodiversity (physiological measurements, phenology), in the context of the transition from pasture (both active and inactive) to forest. Field research will be complemented by larger-scale investigations using remote sensing techniques (land-use maps over time, algorithms for snow cover and primary productivity). The multidisciplinary research includes socioeconomic sciences, which will assess perceptions of land-use change in the countries involved in the project and the ongoing processes.