SUMMARY
Pollution, environmental disruption, oversized urban development and infrastructure new construction jeopardize landscape integrity and people’s quality of life. Research deals with the landscape protection and enhancement providing governments and decision makers with a comprehensive Decision Support System to assess the quality of natural and cultural heritage and address planning measures and policy actions for landscape treasuring. Research set-up a methodology relying upon GIS tools, to spatially discover, detect and define landscape units, so called “Landscape Elements” (“Elementi di Paesaggio”, EdP), along with their endowment such as natural, ecological,historic, cultural, and urban resources. Then evaluate them through a Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) tool set-up by the research team and integrated with a GIS. Research developed a Case Study in the European Mediterranean Basin, validating the whole census system and the performance and support of valuation tools. Results achieved open the possibility to generalize the prototype application at the regional, country and federation levels and therefore support the planning implementation for landscape enhancement.DOI: http://dx.medra.org/10.19254/LaborEst.09.19