The discrepancy in data availability between the case study areas resulted in two different land
cover mapping methods. The year 1989 was chosen as a baseline year for both areas in accordance
with the stakeholders and to represent the situation before the intense socio-economic changes. For the
Italian case study area, we updated existent 1980 and 2000 land use maps to improve the level of detail
and to generate the 2010 map, using the above-mentioned ancillary data. All maps were updated by
manual digitization and the integration of different datasets (e.g., land use and forest type map) in a
GIS [47]. The land use maps were stratified into land cover maps, with a smaller number of classes