Application of a Method for the Classification of Agricultural Areas

The continuing “erosion” of agricultural soils over the last forty years in favour of urbanized areas has led to a considerable reduction in the U.A.S.A (Useful Agricultural Surface Area). Considering that this phenomenon is mainly to do with areas of plain(and that the agricultural land-surface area in Italy is, strictly speaking, equal to 67% of the total land-surface area, with an overwhelming predominance of hilly and mountainous terrain), it is clear that there is a need to protect the extra-urban soil. Such land constitutes a non-reproducible limited resource and is useful in terms both of productivity and landscape and environment. With such an aim in mind, the Sicilian Region Council passed Regional Law n° 15 of 30th April 1991, art.3, point 10, which states as follows: “The provisions of the Local Councils’ general planning regulations must be compatible with the agricultural and forestry studies to be carried out by graduates in agricultural and forestry sciences according to point 5 of article 2 of the regional law of 27th December 1978, n°71, and with the dispositions of article 15, letter e of the regional law n° 78 of 16th June 1976,which the Local Councils are obliged to provide for in their territory ”. The above authors have defined methodology,application and information theory aspects for the classification of rural territory relating to the compiling of information by A.F.S. In this work, the above-mentioned methodology is applied to a suitable Local Council area on the Ionian coast of Sicily with the use of a software programme (Arc View Gis).