An Interdisciplinary Approach for Environmental Sustainability: A New Metric for Land Use Estimation

This paper describes a new metric for land use estimation based on two indicators: the Anthropentropy Factor, which expresses the impact of anthropic settlements on wild nature, and the Forest Status Quality, which measures quality and extension of the forests according to their ecological components. The novelty of this contribution consists in the combination of the two indicators into a single Smart Land Use Estimator, and in the embedding of a new parameter related to the hydrogeological risk of the territory. This is multidisciplinary study because tools and algorithms of Computer Science (image processing) are applied to data and concepts coming from Botany, Hydrology and Geology. For this reason, in the paper, some issues and proposed solutions about the multidisciplinary communication are investigated. The application of this smart indicator is to drive policy makers by suggesting the opportunity or not to build new anthropic settlements for a real sustainable development, by considering both biodiversity preservation and human safety against catastrophic events, such as landslides and floods. The results are presented for a part of the territory in the North of Italy in which the hydrogeologic risk and the impact of human settlements (population density and land use) are particularly high