Botanical and ecological description of pasture types in an area of the Italian Alps.

Alpine landscape is the outcome of the interactions between environment, vegetation and local populations activities. The knowledge of the vegetation types present in the mountain areas is an important tool for the proper management of such environments, that are very delicate and threatened by the socio-economic changes of the last decades, like the development of industry and tourism and the demographic decrease. The aim of the study was to create an handbook for the description of the most important pastoral types present in the area. The study has been carried out in Comelico (Eastern Italian Alps), an inner alpine valley on a pastoral surface of more than 2,000 ha. The research is based on about 350 point quadrat transects according to Daget and Poissonet (1969), the application of multivariate statistics and of the Landolt ecological indexes (1977) for the discrimination of different identified types. The survey permitted the identification of 6 main pasture types, that include 15 ecofacies, and it allowed both the ecological and botanical description of the different pasture communities in order to deepen the knowledge on the characteristics and the dynamics of the Comelico grazed lands.