NEUTRAL BUFFER MODEL. Algorithms-Aided Design for the Buffer Areas around the lagoon of Scardovari, in the Po Delta Unesco Biosphere Reserve, Italy.

The thesis investigates the potential of parametric modelling to assist the landscape scenarios' design in the so-called “Buffer Zones”: which are peripheral to a specific protected area (i.e. “Core Zone”) and surrounded by the “Transition Zone”, where the artificial gradient is supposed to be higher.

The project is developed in the Scardovari lagoon area in the Po Delta UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, recently referred to as Buffer Zone but never strengthened in that sense. At the moment, the strict and rigid arrangement of Buffer areas in the “Sacca” affects negatively the biodiversity rate of the Core Zone resulting also in a less resilient environment face to climate change forecasts.

Buffer zones' design and management is particularly interesting because, here, the limits of artificial and spontaneous landscape are blurred and difficult to detect. The design suggestion is to transfer and boost this ambiguity to the Buffer Zone typology reaching a more flexible and permeable model. The aim is to understand how the Buffer Zones' landscape and its ecological patterns could evolve following different future environmental conditions, maintaining at the same time their functional role for protected areas.

Under this premise, the thesis develops an algorithm (based on “Neutral Landscape Models”) which allows to define, parametrically, different digital landscape scenarios starting from the existing situation. Each scenario is linked to measurable biotic variables (such as vegetation types and sea level variations) which give a feedback on the biological landscape value connected to that specific layout. Assisted by such instrument, the landscape design of Scardovari is carried on developing the solution which better seems to optimize “Core Zone” protection in a future perspective.