Migliorare la sostenibilità territoriale - strutture di analisi spaziale per indagare l'espressione dei servizi ecosistemici

The current doctoral research has been focused on Ecosystem Services (ES)-based formal and analytical approaches, to support territorial sustainability. Addressing the above-mentioned issue allowed me to explore ES’s role in contributing to the global sustainable development goals, and provide spatially explicit methodologies to support ES assessment on local and large territorial scales. Thanks to the results to be discussed, this work has been part of various strategically important local, national, and international projects. At the local scale, the main outcomes of the doctoral research are currently supporting the municipality of L’Aquila (central Italy) to reframe its urban boundaries. At a higher scale, several elaborations have been employed in the SICURA project, to define strategies for integrated risk management in urban areas. ES-related methodologies and elaborations are also supporting several actions of the LIFE IMAGINE project. LIFE IMAGINE aims to create an integrated management system to achieve the conservation objectives of the EU Habitats and Birds directives in the Umbria region (central Italy) in an economically and technically sustainable way. The research also assisted the Sost.EN.&Re project, aimed at supporting the implementation, in central Italy, of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development. Finally, several research applications are currently employed in the newly launched Horizon 2020 project ”U CAN”, whose objective is to provide ad hoc analyses to align Ukrainian cities with European climate policies. I hope that the research results will contribute to enriching the existing ES knowledge in local and large territorial scales, towards the achievement of sustainable development.