## 2 Materials and Methods
### Landscape Analysis  
Land use/cover change (LUCC), as the result of policies and human activities, modifies the original structural integrity of the landscape, determining new landscape patterns and \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l} \hline \hline
**Land-Use Label** &
\begin{tabular}{l} **Land Use Classes in the 2009 Map (Campania Region Agricultural** \\ **Land Uses Map)** \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline Urban & Urbanized environment and artificial surfaces \\ \hline Agricultural areas & Protected crops (greenhouses); arable crops (autumn-winter arable crops, spring-summer arable crops, alternate fodder crops, other arable crops); permanent crops (orchards and minor fruits, fruit trees or shrubs plants, olive groves, citrus groves, fruit chestnut groves, poplar groves, willow groves, other broad-leaved trees, other permanent crops or fruit trees); permanent forage; heterogeneous agricultural areas \\ \hline Vineyards & Vineyards \\ \hline Forest & Deciduous woods; coniferous woods; mixed forests of conifers and deciduous trees \\ \hline \hline \multirow{6}{*}{Sparse vegetation} & Mainly shrub and / or herbaceous vegetation cover in natural evolution (natural pasture areas and high altitude grasslands, bushes and shrubs, areas with sclerophyll vegetation, areas with arboreal and shrub vegetation in evolution, areas with natural recolonization, areas with artificial recolonization and reforestation); open areas with sparse or absent vegetation; beaches, dunes and sands, bare rocks and outcrops; areas with sparse vegetation; areas degraded by fires and other events \\ \hline Water/Other & Waters; wetlands \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Thematic generalization for the 2009 LU map. Figure 4: Detailed views of a portion of the original maps (1817-sheet 9 and 1907-sheet 184 II N.E. (Monte Vesuvio), respectively) and the corresponding raster classification of the same area. affecting the ability of ecosystems to provide the services and biodiversity on which humans definitely depend [19; 26]. For these reasons, landscape ecology focuses on the analysis of landscape structure and ecological processes and their implications [27], and as such has developed the landscape metrics concept. Due to their capacity of characterizing landscape patterns basing on spatial attributes, landscape metrics can be considered as a useful tool for analysing the structure, function and dynamics of landscapes. Landscape metrics are algorithms that quantify spatial characteristics of patches, classes of patches or entire landscape mosaics, supporting landscape analysis by means of objective/mathematical indices. In these terms, they contribute to providing valuable information to improve the assessment of the ecological functioning, economic wealth and aesthetic value of a region [11; 28; 29]. The transformation of urban and peri-urban land use patterns is generally analysed by means of LMs in order to better understand and more accurately characterize developmental processes and their consequences, in terms of both past recognition and the assessment of constructed scenarios [30; 31; 32; 33]. In the present paper, starting from different studies dealing with the issue of uncontrolled urban expansion [18; 33; 34], several LMs were chosen. The aim was to identify the urban/peri-urban spatial processes that characterized the study area, in terms of aggregation, compaction and dispersion/isolation, with reference to the each time step considered. Specifically, a small set of metrics was chosen at class level, and the four time step maps were processed. According to the Aguilera analysis method [33], developed for Mediterranean urban growth in the case of a medium size city, the selected metrics are described as follows (Table 2):  
* Aggregation metrics. These metrics refer to the tendency of patch types to be spatially aggregated by means of the clustering of patches to form patches of a large size.