Multiscale Digital Landscape Reconstructions for Resilient Mountain Inner Areas

Lacking, declining, marginal, inner areas overlap worldwide with intermediate, rural and mountain territories where climate change and inherent social spatial vulnerabilities inhibit a smart, sustainable, and inclusive development. Within this framework, the present contribution addresses the lack of methodologies for engaging and empowering community resilience in the case of Italian mountain inner areas by investigating the integrated application of digital tools, technologies and techniques for their planning, design, and management. In a landscape-scale perspective, this work adopts an interdisciplinary and multiscale approach towards the development of rapid and low-cost workflows for 3D reconstructions to support information management activities. Connecting a wide range of methods and tools (i.e., GIS mapping, photogrammetry, point cloud modeling), two research explorations conducted in the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy) are presented as complementary approaches towards the digital representation of fragile landscapes at different spatial scales of action: the territorial scale of municipal planning in Val di Sole, where 2.5D visualizations of cartographic information in a GIS environment and 3D models relying on satellite data are identified; and the tree scale of forest management in the Mesiano University park, where low-cost alternatives for under-storey vegetation 3D mapping (i.e., Apple iPad Pro with LiDAR sensor and Ricoh Theta V 360° camera) are tested.