>Publications
Forests, 12, 1266 (2021) DOI:10.3390/f12091266
Analysis of the Olive groves destructions by Xylella fastidosa bacterium effect on the Land Surface Temperature in Salento detected using Satellite Images
T. Semeraro, R. Buccolieri, M. Vergine, L. De Bellis, A. Luvisi, R. Emmanuel, N. MarwanAgricultural activities are a major cause of land cover changes that simplifies the landscape pattern replacing natural vegetation with cultivated determinging effects on local and global climate changes. The strong specializations of agricultural productions can lead to extensive monoculture farmingwith a low biodiversity which may involve low landscape resilience against disturbances events. This is the case of Salento peninsula, in the Apulia region (Italy), where the Xylella fastidiosa bacterium causes mass death of olive trees, many of them in monumental olive groves. Therefore, the historical land cover that characterized the landscape is currently in a transition phase and can strongly affect climate conditions. This study aims to analyze the effect of X. fastidiosa on local climate change due to the mass destruction of olive groves. Data of land surface temperature (LST) detected by Landsat 8 and MODIS satellite images are used as a proxy of the microclimate mitigation ecosystem services linked at the evolution of the land cover. Moreover, the recurrence quantification analysis is applied to study the LST evolution. The analysis showed that olive groves are less capable of the forest class to mitigate the LST, but they are more capable than arable lands, above all in the summertime, when the air temperature is the highest. Furthermore, the recurrence analysis shows that X. fastidiosa is rapidly changing the LST of the olive groves into values comparable to those of arable land, with a difference in LST reduced to less than a third to six years from the identification of the bacterium in Apulia. Failure to restore the initial environmental conditions can be connected with the slow progress of the uprooting of infected plants and their replacement, probably due to the attempt to save the historical aspect of the landscape and find solutions to avoid the uprooting of diseased plants. This suggests how the social and economic components of the social-ecological systems have to be more flexible to phytosanitary epidemics and adapt to ecological processes, which cannot always be easily controlled, to produce more resilient landscapes and avoid unwanted transformations.
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