Desertification risk assessment in southern Mediterranean areas

Abstract. The paper deals some important aspects concerning the study of desertification phenomenon that has significantly interested all European countries of the Mediterranean basin in the last decades. The territorial sensibility, qualitatively and/or quantitatively, of the risk related to the desertification processes has been valued as grade of susceptibility to the phenomenon in the study area, with respect to the hydraulic and hydrologic conditioning factors. The methodological approach followed is based on the classification of desertification indicators by means of a suitable conceptual model applied to the study area in Basilicata region. The classical desertification indexes have been evaluate referring to the study area generating temporal informative map. To achieve such objective, the historical series of temperatures and rainfall of several gauge-stations have been analysed, and the first results show an increasing trend for the temperature in last years, according to the global scale. An increase of aridity and erosion index values is, also, outlined by the collected data with slight reductions at higher altitudes.