Citation: Vannucci, A.; Andreoli, M.; Rovai, M. Land Use Change and Disappearance of Hedgerows in a Tuscan Rural Landscape: A Discussion on Policy Tools to Revert This Trend. Sustainability 2022, 14, 13341. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su142013341 Academic Editor: Hossein Azadi Received: 25 August 2022 Accepted: 12 October 2022 Published: 17 October 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article Land Use Change and Disappearance of Hedgerows in a Tuscan Rural Landscape: A Discussion on Policy Tools to Revert This Trend Antonio Vannucci 1 , Maria Andreoli 2 and Massimo Rovai 3, * 1 Independent Researcher, 56034 Chianni, Italy 2 Laboratorio di Studi Rurali “Sismondi”, 56127 Pisa, Italy 3 Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering (DCIE), University of Pisa, 56122 Pisa, Italy * Correspondence: massimo.rovai@unipi.it Abstract: Agricultural modernization brought about a significant land use change, with the expansion both of crops that could be more easily mechanized and of woodland and natural areas. Meanwhile, to increase the cultivated area, the farmland fabric of patches and infrastructures underwent a process of progressive simplification that caused the disappearance of landscape elements with high ecological value, such as hedgerows and isolated trees. This paper first analyses the land cover of the territory of a hilly inland municipality in Tuscany (Italy) in the years 1954, 1978 and 2016 and then assesses the loss of hedgerows and isolated trees that occurred between 1954–2016 in a sub-area. This analysis was performed using photointerpretation based on Q-GIS. Secondly, the paper analyzes the drivers of these phenomena focusing on the main direct and indirect costs of reintroducing hedgerows. Finally, it discusses the role of available policy instruments and planning tools in reversing hedgerow-loss trends. Results show that current policies were scarcely effective both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view and that more complex and coordinated tools are needed. While the discussion is mainly based on the case-study analysis, based on the authors’ opinion it could be applied to many other areas. Keywords: land use land cover change (LULC); landscape evolution; ecological infrastructures; hedgerows; Tuscany; GIS; spatial analysis; agro-environmental policies 1. Introduction Since the end of World War II, the agriculture of developed countries underwent intense processes of modernization. Meanwhile, there was a process of spatial redistribution of the population, who first moved from countryside to urban centers, while in more recent years there was a phenomenon of counter-urbanization. The above phenomena constitute the main drivers of land use change in rural areas, bringing about, from the one hand, a loss of agricultural land due to urban sprawl and renaturalization of abandoned marginal areas and, on the other hand, a productive intensification of more fertile areas through the modernization of traditional productive techniques [1–6]. Changes involved not only the intensity of use of inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides but also impacted crop mixes and the spatial fabric of elementary productive units, influencing land use. In the past, the need to exploit farmland at the maximum and the lack of access to modern inputs made it useful to keep hedges of trees at field borders for productive use, e.g., for the provision of fodder for livestock, timber, firewood, or fruits from the trees at the sides of arable land [7]. Isolated trees, together with productive functions, were useful for providing a shadowy place where to rest. The introduction of powerful machines where animal labor has been used for centuries asked for a reshape of fields that became increasingly large and regular, while hedgerows used as a boundary between fields or isolated trees lost their productive uses and were seen only as elements hampering a modern use of machinery. According to [8], Sustainability 2022, 14, 13341. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142013341 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability