Phytotoponyms a tool to forest landscape analysis and its transformations. The case study of Calabria (Southern Italy).

Place names provide important information about history, language and human rela- tionships with the land. Phytotoponyms (plant place names) could be used in analyz- ing current and past distribution of plants and vegetation and to highlight the changes in the land use due to the human impact and/or climate change aimed to support forest restoration. To assess this possibility we have considered all the phytotoponyms relat- ed to species and forest ecosystems in Calabria (Southern Italy). As data source we used the official Calabrian topographic maps in scale 1:25,000 and 1:10,000, and the literature data on the Italian toponymy. To interpret place names related to plants and avoid mistakes, we carried out a linguistic and naturalistic joint analysis. We identified 1460 phytotoponyms belonging to 48 forest species and 321 place names related to forests. The most common plants are Castanea sativa (9.7%), Quercus pubescens s. l. (7%), Salix sp. pl. (6.5%), Q. frainetto (5.1%), Q. suber (5%). All the phytotoponyms were geo-referenced and incorporated into a GIS. Phytotoponyms distribution maps were generated and compared with the current Calabrian forest vegetation, using dig- ital orthophotos, land use maps and literature data. A good correspondence between phytotoponyms and forest vegetation for mountain belt was highlighted, only for Q. frainetto we found a reduction in some area. Instead, in the coastal and hilly belt, we observed a significant decrease in the area covered by forest, such as cork woods, ther- mophilic oak woods and Mediterranean bush, and the disappearance of wet forests with Fraxinus oxycarpa. The spread of phytotoponyms concerning species linked to the forest degradation, as Spartium junceum and Ampelodesmos mauritanicus, high- lights an ancient anthropic impact on forests. Overall, the use of phytotoponyms is an important tool to analyze the changes in the vegetation cover. It can provide useful information about restoration of forest ecosystems.