The Landscape Change in the Alps—What Postcards Have to Say about Aesthetic Preference

Land use changes in the Alps over the last few decades have been characterised by a significant increase in forest coverage as a result of the abandonment of marginal agricultural sites. Natural afforestation and species protection laws affected the ecosystem, and therefore the services provided by the mountain environment, including landscape structure and aesthetics, changed. This work assess the changes in the ecosystem services offered by forests since 1954 in a region of the Italian Alps. Some ES were estimated in this work with GIS, and others were taken from the literature or the authors’ previous works. Since the 1950s, forest ecosystem services such as growing stock, protection from hydro-geological hazards and carbon storage have increased. Deer and other forest species have risen in number. On the other hand, there has been a depletion of open space for priority habitats and species such as black grouse and capercaillie. Old postcards were used to understand land use change and people’s aesthetic preferences. To determine people’s preferences for the landscape, we used records of over 300,000 postcards, sold during nearly two decades. The most often chosen postcard portrayed a landscape of the 1970s with a mix of forest and open space, different from the scenario that the buyers could observe. The sales records for over 20 years of postcard business and the dates of the postcards that we obtained in this research allowed us to perform a quantitative analysis of landscape preferences. The main subject of the photo was a good predictor of the number of postcards sold, according to generalised linear models (GLM); and postcards of overly exploited landscapes, dense forest coverage or buildings were significantly less likely to be chosen. Artificially reinstating open areas will boost biodiversity and could recreate a landscape that resembles the historical agro-ecosystem without interfering with the forest’s other functions. These findings will help managers and policy makers evaluate cultural ecosystem resources in the face of changing mountain landscapes.