I caratteri della vegetazione come descrittori della qualità ambientale: un’applicazione cartografica (provincia di Varese, Lombardia).

Vegetation mapping and application of environmental quality indexes to the territory of the province of Varese (Lombardy) - The problem of the environmental quality definition has been dealt using vegetation analysis and describer indexes. The study has been carried out over a large medium-scale territory (province of Varese), creating a georeferenced archives. As first step the vegetation map has been realized after photo-interpretation and field surveys. The main map features consist of physiognomic and structural characteristics and ecological remarks (legend with 34 categories), scale 1:10.000 and smallest area mapped equal to 0.25 ha. The map has been digitalized by Autocad and then re-elaborated by PcArcInfo and ArcView Gis 3.1. The criteria employed for vegetation evaluation are: structure and maturity of vegetation, naturalness and type of occurrence (zonal, azonal or extrazonal communities), floristic richness and rarity. An index has been created according with each criterion; six numerical values (ranging from 0 to 5) were then assigned to each vegetation. The analysis of environmental quality has been carried out by monothematic maps derived from each index and by a map obtained from the formulation of a synthetical index.