Climate-driven dynamics in the Mediterranean agroecosystems: a pre-2007 economic crisis satellite-based sustainability analysis

Interactions between land cover and climate constitute one of the points most investigated by scientists, both locally and globally. Technological developments since the 1970s, with the launch of the first civilian satellites to monitor Earth’s surface, have increasingly facilitated the large-scale investigation of the relationship between climate and land cover to derive useful insights into ecosystem dynamics. In this context, the first sensor enabling continental and global assessments was the Advanced Very-High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), thanks to its coarse resolutions and the availability of a very long time series. In this study, trends in photosynthetic activity and their relationships with climate are assessed for a Mediterranean region affected by major environmental and infrastructural fragilities (Southern Italy) in the period 1982-2006, before the advent of the 2007 and 2008 global financial crisis.