Sogesca (Italy)

Understanding how land use and land cover changes (LULCCs) affect ecosystem services (ES) is essential for guiding sustainable management strategies in protected areas (PAs), particularly in small island contexts where ecological processes, historical land uses and socio-economic dynamics are tightly interwoven. This study explores the medium-term dynamics of ES supply using LULCCs as a spatial indicator on the island of Asinara (Italy). Spatially modelled results show that the transition from agricultural and semi-natural uses to uncultivated areas, driven by land abandonment and soft nature-restoration actions, has reshaped the balance between provisioning, regulating and cultural services, generating reflections on opportunities and land management challenges. These outcomes require careful contextualization to reflect underlying ecological processes and land capabilities, highlighting the need for governance frameworks oriented towards conservation-driven landscape management rather than passive rewilding, especially in landscapes long shaped by human activities. More generally, sustainability in PAs is not an automatic outcome of protection or abandonment, but a contingent, spatially differentiated and governed process, in which indicators and maps serve to guide decisions, not to certify their success.

The quality of waterways in general and the minimum vital flow rate of rivers in particular are concepts that are subject to a broad range of interpretations. This is reflected in particular on the quantification of parameters that reduce law provisions to a series of limits to be observed. It is felt that this subject should be completely reviewed as follows: a) rather than fixing general standards, particular local contexts should be borne in mind; b) one should look in particular at the water basin as a whole — to which a given discharge or the situation of a particular waterway of a given section to be regulated refers — as a system of relations between uses and resources that should include water resource protection and the system of concessions for the public use of water; c) finally, one should move from the concept of limits to be observed to that of acceptability intervals, or rather to that of satisfying demand curves for the use of public waterway assets. The concept is well known in welfare economics and public choice literature, yet is hardly able to find a place in engineering and standards practices. The intrinsic complexity of the problem cannot always be overcome through simple solutions. In many cases these may not be effective, or at least efficient.

The purpose of this work is to delineate a technique of defining managing software, in the direction of multiprogrammed minicomputers, ca pable of distinguishing this software from the hardware on which it will operate and easily adaptable to various operative conditions.