A survey on public forest seedling production in Italy

Abstract

In the upcoming years, the challenge of the exponential growth in tree planting activities matching climate crisis, which requires the use of targeted and adapted plant material, calls for creating an updated framework of the Italian forest nursery sector, for both basic materials (BM) and for forest reproductive materials (FRM). The present paper aims at highlighting pros and cons of the public nursery system and, at the same time, characterizing the current organization and production capacity in quantitative and qualitative terms. Our effort was focused on recovering information, topic for the development of the sector, which has been gradually weakened in the last decades. The research was carried out in two steps: (a) analysis of the online available sources; (b) diagnostic analysis by questionnaire to the nursery sector managers. The specific objectives were: (i) describing the state of the art of the available MBs; (ii) qualifying and quantifying the seedlings production (active nurseries, management of nurseries in the regions, typology and types of FRM produced and species); (iii) understanding the real and potential users of BM and FRM; and (iv) assessing the usability of information related to the nursery chain. The picture at national scale is definitively fragmented from all points of view: availability of BM, usability of available information, production capacity of FRM, rationalization and innovation of growing systems, computerization. Although virtuous cases were found, the Italian forest nursery sector generally needs a profound revitalization to cope with the imminent increasing demand for target material.

Keywords

• forest seedlings production
• forest reproductive material
• basic material
• public forest nurseries
• forest nursery stock production