Extensive monitoring of Italian forests: integration of the National Forest Inventory with the European Network of Level I

Abstract

Extensive monitoring of Italian forests: integration of the National Forest Inventory with the European Network of Level I. Forest monitoring is important for enhancing our knowledge on such ecosystems and their changes in order to enable actions helpful for their protection. At the European level, several monitoring programmes are carried out at present to pursue a better knowledge of specific characteristics of forests. Among those, national forest inventories are carried out to give a picture of their status (forest area, forest types, timber volume, growth and others), whereas health status of forests has been monitored over twenty years thanks to a specific programme, the ICP Forests. Under LIFE+ programme 2007, the FutMon project funded country-level studies aiming at evaluating the possibility to merge national forest inventory and Level I sample plots in a unique set of plots for forest monitoring and survey protocol. The underlying idea is that a common set of plots would enhance efficiency either in terms of costs or in terms of scientific results. However, an important issue is to preserve the validity of the twenty-years-long existing data series. For this reason in Italy, in 2009 and 2010, an experiment was carried out by measuring a common set of variables both in the Level I plots and in a subset of the inventory plots, in order to evaluate differences and similarities of surveying variables in the two different plot samples. More specifically, the integration between the two programmes would imply a change in the crown-condition sample-trees selection criteria and the shift of the Level I network to the inventory one. On the basis of the results, from 2012 the National Forest Inventory protocol for sample-trees selection has already been adopted on the Level I plots, whereas the feasibility of shifting the Level I plots from the ICP network to the National Forest Inventory one is still under evaluation.

Keywords

• Forest Monitoring
• Forest Inventory
• Forest Crown Condition
• ICP Forests Level I
• Italian Forests