management practices (at the mesoand macro-scale). The survey of farming practices is meant to improve the evaluation of the “fragility” of land patterns (Rizzo 2009), so as to identify the most critical ones, such as hazardous soil reservoirs defined by complex management practices and located in abandoned patches. The correct mapping of land patterns and the related land management practices aims to enhance the conservation of the natural resources of terraced landscape, namely to orient the proper preservation of its hydrogeological functions (Savo et al. 2013). In summary, a landscape agronomic approach could help to better locate the terrace management actions and to relate them to the overall landscape rebuilding (Di Fazio et al. 2005; LaFevor 2014; Qiu et al. 2013). This could lead, for instance, to opt for rewilding those abandoned patches having a marginal role in the system management instead of pursuing the onerous complete restoration of a whole abandoned landscape (e.g. Rizzo et al. 2014).

12.3.3 Maintenance

The interactions between agriculture and the land have dramatically evolved during the last decades, in particular, for the steady decrease in the number of farmers and the land tenure dynamics. In plain areas, this was related to an increase of the farms size, while in slope areas, the evolution rather concerned the ageing of the local population, the arrival of newcomers, and a marked fragmentation of properties. Terraced landscapes have undergone to even more extreme changes with the loss of the system perspective due to a deepening break in the knowledge transmission of the management practices. In a landscape agronomy perspective, the proper maintenance of terrace features requires (i) to address explicitly the management practices, (ii) to zone the landscape accordingly, and (iii) to redefine the meaning of “traditional”. A first limitation in a suitable terrace maintenance is the consistency of resolution between available topographic data and the terrace features, whose size is usually narrow than the most common data sources. Nevertheless, advances in remote sensing (e.g. airborne laser scanner) are enhancing the mapping capabilities, eventually allowing to overcome the difficulties to identify the characteristics of these features (e.g. Chartin et al. 2011; Rizzo et al. 2007; Sofia et al. 2014a; Sofia et al. 2016). Existing literature widely addressed the mapping of terrace features, mostly drawing the classification on the risks deriving from their abandonment (Brancucci and Paliaga 2006; Tarolli et al. 2014). Yet, a major weakness even of the most advanced studies is the poor consideration of the management practices because they are difficult to survey. The landscape agronomy framework can eventually strengthen the mapping and inventorying of terrace features by stressing in a spatially explicit way the focus on the management impacts on agri-environmental resources (Rizzo 2009). This can be useful to understand the current landscape state and to support the shared design of desired transitions (Gennai-Schott et al. 2014). Several studies contributed insofar to the description and mapping of terraced landscapes, though with increasingly isolated sectoral