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The paper elaborates on the relationship between land cover changes and transformation drivers, by analysing the dynamics that took place between 1990 and 2010 in Mt. Matese area (Italy). Mt. Matese is an interesting case study which was included as a pilot area in the Italian Strategy for Inner Areas. Drivers related to land cover changes include population characteristics, the agricultural and production system, tourist offer, location and settlements dynamics. Land cover changes and the dynamics of studied drivers are analysed in-depth, through a descriptive and multivariate analysis. Results highlight the difficult situation of the study area for many drivers. However, the slow changes in land cover and the potentialities offered by the natural environment, as well as by the agriculture and tourism sectors, outline some development prospects. The paper outlines the current scenario in the area and provides useful references for future policies aimed at setting up this area as National Park and at implementing the Strategy for Inner Areas.

The landscape has always been a fundamental factor in defining tourist flow attraction for local development. In this paper, landscape related to tourism have been analysed using three different measurements through appropriate performance indicators and rationalised with the aim of identifying a scheme of mutual relations. Applying advanced statistical methods of ranking and data synthesis, the area investigated (Molise, Italy) has been divided into different zones. Each area described has a specific relation between tourism and landscape useful in the implementation of optimal promotion strategies and valorisation of the area. In marginal areas, tourism can have an excellent growth potential, since they are characterized by the high quality of the landscape. However, the analysis highlights some gap areas, which means the existence of areas with high quality of the natural and agricultural landscape is not associated with an appropriate tourism development, or areas where the high tourism development is not associated with an appreciable quality of the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the features of Italian agritourism farms (agritourisms) by analysing their economic, structural and localization features, in order to examine the relations of agritourism with rural development and land use policy. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of about 11,000 farms from the Italian Farm Accountancy Data Network ( Fadn ) dataset. Given that agritourisms represent a minority among farms, the sample is strongly imbalanced towards farms without agritourism activities. In order to avoid the difficulties arising when analyzing imbalanced samples, we use the Random OverSampling Examples ( Rose ) approach that has been recently proposed in the statistical literature to obtain representative balanced samples from imbalanced ones. The empirical results show that landscape and environmental variables are important in shaping the probability that a farm runs agritourism activities. This results, together with others related to the economic dimension of the farm, its specialization, and the characteristics of the farmer make it possible to argue that there are areas of the country that can offer potential to agritourism, and that agritourism in turn can open new horizons in rural development with possible beneficial effects on the environment, the landscape, and the reduction of depopulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]