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Staff Profiles

Dr Filippo Brandolini

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow

Background

I am an archaeologist with an interdisciplinary background. I obtained my PhD in Environmental Sciences at the Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy) with the project: "Linking Environmental Archaeology to Geoheritage: a multifaceted approach to unravel and promote past fluvial landscapes". My research has been especially focused on fluvial environments; thus, I achieved fluvial and alluvial geomorphology and geoarchaeology expertise. I work with quantitative methods and remote sensing tools to reconstruct palaeo-landscape and understand the effect of the human-environment interplay in the past millennia. I am willing to promote open-science and the use of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) protocols. 

Research

Historic Landscape and Soil Sustainability

I am currently working on the relationships between sustainability and landscape heritage with particular reference to soil loss and degradation over the long term. My project (HiLSS- Historic Landscape and Soil Sustainability) will take a multidisciplinary approach that combines archaeology, Historical Landscape Characterisation (HLC), geosciences, and computer-based geospatial analysis (GIS - Geographical Information Systems) and modelling (RUSLE - Revisited Universal Soil Loss Equation).

This project will focus on two mountainous regions that present historical and cultural similarities but located in different climatic zones of Europe (1- Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, Italy; 2- Northern-mid Galicia, Spain). In previous HLC studies, land-use has been evaluated from the perspective of cultural heritage, whereas RUSLE have used it as a proxy for the land-cover of an area and its effect on soil erosion. The HiLSS project will propose an innovative methodology that combines both the historic/cultural values and the environmental values of land-use to inform development of a model for the sustainable conservation. By considering the different agricultural land-use HLC types in GIS-RUSLE modelling, it will be possible to quantify the effect on soil loss for each HLC type and consequently to devise more environmentally sustainable management for each type.

Environmental sustainability and historic landscape conservation are typically treated as two separate fields, but the HiLSS project will develop a transformative model for interdisciplinary research, proposing a new way to embrace both cultural and natural values as components of the same landscape management plans.

This work research is financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant agreement ID:  No 890561.

Publications