Mountain areas of Italy experienced substantial socio-ecological changes over the last decades. Partly due to outmigration, traditional agro-forestry activities and cultural landscapes were progressively abandoned and forest expanded substantially. Concurrently, the introduction of the Habitats Directive and the Italian Framework Law on Protected Areas led to the designation of a vast network of protected areas. Abandonment and protection triggered profound changes. Many areas underwent a process of spontaneous rewilding, whose ecological consequences are still to be fully understood. These areas can therefore be seen as a quasi-experimental benchmark for assessing how passive rewilding, an increasingly invoked Nature-Based Solution, performs in tackling biodiversity loss and improving the resilience of natural ecosystems to climate change. BECAUSE (“plant Biodiversity and Ecosystem Change in protected Areas: land-Use impacts and Scenario Evaluation”) proposes an interdisciplinary, data-driven approach to understand historical and future trends of plant biodiversity in Italian rewilded mountain areas. We will produce spatially explicit assessments of vegetation change between 1990 and 2020 in three mountain protected areas spanning the Italian Peninsula: 1) Eastern Alps (Lagorai mountain range); 2) Northern Apennines (Foreste Casentinesi Monte Falterona e Campigna NP), and 3) Central Apennines (Velino Massif).

The project is funded by European Union – Next-GenerationEU – National Recovery and Resilience PLAN (PNRR) – Mission 4, Component 2, Investiment 1.1 Fondo per il Programma Nazionale di Ricerca e Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN). Project N. P2022JM3RZ