The prescription of stand rotation according to site conditions and economic targets requires yield information that expresses stand productivity under different site-classes. This is particularly ...relevant for the optimal management of chestnut coppices allowing the production of timber assortments sized differently. This paper reports a new yield model built for chestnut coppices of the Cimini and Vicani mountains (Central Italy), according to three site index classes. The model focuses on the development of stands after an intense thinning carried out at the ages of 13-14 years. The model is compared with two previous yield tables built for chestnut coppice forests living in the same area and including one site index class only. The study stresses the high productivity of chestnut coppices growing on the volcanic soils of Cimini and Vicani mountains and shows how the growth course following intense thinning allows to get stems with large mean volume at the end of rotation. In the light of the most recent studies on the causes of ring shake, i.e. the most relevant defect of chestnut wood, the negative consequences on timber quality originating from the current thinning regime are also outlined.
Urban green infrastructure, including street trees, plays a key role in providing ecosystem services to urban residents. However, to fully understand the effective role of trees in the urban context, ...it is also necessary to evaluate the disservices that they can produce in the development of their functions if not managed in an adequate and integrated way. This contribution aims to demonstrate an approach to assess three disservices (pavement damage, aesthetic damage, likelihood of tree failure) of street trees at the municipal level, starting from the existing municipal tree inventory. In this case study, from the street tree population, a sample of approximately 5% of the trees was drawn by stratified random sampling, where the strata were composed of groups of tree species. In particular, a sampling scheme is adapted in which the probability to select a tree in the sample is greater for bigger trees, under the assumption that the bigger the trees the greater are the disservices caused. In this way, a greater precision of the estimates of the considered disservices for the population of urban trees is expected. The results show a high variability of disservices provision among species groups. The results also confirmed a positive correlation between the considered disservices and tree diameter at breast height, while other tree attributes such as total height and crown diameter were found to be positively related only to pavement damages. Finally, severe pruning can lead to a high level of the aesthetic and functional disservices even for shorter and younger street trees.
•Disservices and tree diameter at breast height are positively correlated.•Disservices provided by street trees are assessed based on existing municipal tree inventory.•A high variability in disservices provision was found among species groups.•Severe pruning can lead to a high level of the aesthetic and functional disservices.
Multifunctional forest management should provide the opportunity to create, conserve, modify or eliminate forest roads. Within protected areas, it is difficult to make a single assessment of the ...degree of accessibility to different forest areas, having to mediate among productive forestry, protection needs and other benefits deriving from forest stands. A GIS-based methodology, with the support of a Forest Information System (FIS) and available Forest Plans for the study area, were applied to create an accessibility map (based on the forest roads network) for the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park (PNALM). Results were related to several FIS metadata, highlighting that accessibility in the study area was sufficient, but not optimal, in the productive management units, being rather poor in those where soil protection and biodiversity conservation are the main functions (only 38.8% of them were accessible). Forest roads density (28.5 m ha
−1
) was not homogeneously distributed within the study area and the ratio between forest road length (199.4 km) and planned forest surface (13,355.3 ha) is only 14.9 m ha
−1
. In contrast to what is commonly found in forest accessibility works, the innovative element of this study was the involvement of PNALM's technical office in evaluating the results and exploring the opportunity to adopt a different policy for forest roads network management.
Sweet chestnut forests occupy an important role in Italy and Europe, its resilience is often affected by aggressive pathogen attack. In the last times some chestnut wood colour aberrations have ...attracted attention suggesting intercorrelation with biotic attacks. The present study analyses chestnut wood from a coppice-with-standards stand in Central Italy aiming to understand the reasons for discolorations in respect to a possible effect on wood physical and mechanical character. Wood specimens with different chromatic aberrations were analysed by mechanical tests, microscopic techniques (SEM), specific density measurements, and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy. Standing trees and logs were investigated by IML-RESI. Results by SEM show as all stained wood zones correspond to mycelium presence and abnormal cell wall morphologies. No real trend was found between specific density, or compressive strength, with coloured samples, infact some test samples with colour aberrations had the highest value for specific gravity. Comparing sound wood with stained wood, the semiquantitative analysis by ATR-FTIR spectroscopy allowed to detect a change in the ratio lignin/cellulose which might be due to a white rot fungus. IML-Resi has showed wood decay symptoms at root collar in coppice standards with a decrease in amplitude at least of 30%. The results find an agreement with similar studies carried out in Spanish chestnut suggesting to indeep the analysis to investigated the geographical distribution and the impact of the damage.
A number of international agreements and commitments emphasize the importance of appropriate monitoring protocols and assessments as prerequisites for sound conservation and management of the world’s ...forest ecosystems. Mandated periodic surveys, like forest inventories, provide a unique opportunity to identify and properly satisfy natural resource management information needs. Distinctively, there is an increasing need for detecting diversity by means of unambiguous diversity measures. Because all diversity measures are functions of tree species abundances, estimation of tree diversity indices and profiles is inevitably performed by estimating tree species abundances and then estimating indices and profiles as functions of the abundance estimates. This strategy can be readily implemented in the framework of current forest inventory approaches, where tree species abundances are routinely estimated by means of plots placed onto the surveyed area in accordance with probabilistic schemes. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of this strategy by reviewing theoretical results from published case studies. Under uniform random sampling (URS), that is when plots are uniformly and independently located on the study region, consistency and asymptotic normality of diversity index estimators follow from standard limit theorems as the sampling effort increases. In addition, variance estimation and bias reduction are achieved using the jackknife method. Despite its theoretical simplicity, URS may lead to uneven coverage of the study region. In order to avoid unbalanced sampling, the use of tessellation stratified sampling (TSS) is suggested. TSS involves covering the study region by a polygonal grid and randomly selecting a plot in each polygon. Under TSS, the diversity index estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal and more precise than those achieved using URS. Variance estimation is possible and there is no need to reduce bias.
• We combined stem volume increment analysis with dendroecological tools to address two unresolved issues concerning oak dieback in Mediterranean areas: early detection of changes in stand growth, ...and identification of mechanisms for observed growth declines.
• We reconstructed productivity of a stored coppice formed by Turkey oak (
Quercus cerris
) to test if its growth decline was linked to climatic variability, while also accounting for age-related and sociological factors.
• Drought in May–June and in prior-year late summer-autumn was negatively correlated with current growth during 1974–2006. Previous November water balance was the strongest signal. Moving Correlation Functions (11 y windows) indicated that the May–June signal remained dominant until 1996, thereafter falling to non-significant values in parallel with the May–June water balance drying trend; at the same time the previous autumn correlations reached significant values. Since 1994 there was a two-year lagged response to June water balance, suggesting that, when growth declined, loss of current-year climate signals was accompanied by the emergence of previous-year ones.
• Growth and productivity of deciduous oaks in Mediterranean environments is linked to late spring-early summer hydrologic balance; at both annual and decadal timescales, oak growth decline was associated with a delayed response to climate.
Italian stone pine is a landmark of Mediterranean coastal areas. Today, pinewoods represent environmental amenity areas at risk, being under siege from intensive urbanisation. We present an ...emblematic case study in Rome's coastal strip where urban encroachment around pinewoods is somewhat overlooked by urban planning, which may be threatening for their conservation. We studied: (i) changes in land use intensification in the pinewoods' surroundings over the past 60 years (1949-2008), by means of a synthetic index of landscape conservation (ILC) ranging from 0 (maximum level of anthropogenic landscape alteration) to 1 (maximum level of landscape naturalness); (ii) influence of different landscape protection level on land use intensification. Findings show that in areas with low levels of landscape protection, the ILC had been decreasing in the first 100-m surrounding pinewoods, and within the 1-km buffer. The ILC had been rather stable within areas with high levels of landscape protection. Lessons learnt have implications for spatial development strategies to protect coastal pinewoods from external pressures due to future (planned) urban densification in their surroundings.
Converting beech coppices into high forest stands has been promoted in the last decades as a management goal to attenuate the negative effects that frequent clearcutting may have on soil, landscape, ...and biodiversity conservation. The silvicultural tool usually adopted is the gradual thinning of shoots during the long span of time required to complete the conversion, that also allows the owner to keep harvesting some wood. This research reports and discusses, in the light of the ecological intensification approach, the results achieved from an experimental test started more than 25 years ago in a 42-year-old beech (
Fagus sylvatica
L.) coppice with standards in central Italy. The effects of various thinning intensities (three treatments plus a control) on the stand growth and structure are assessed by successive forest inventories. Analyses are integrated by spatial indices to assess stem density and canopy cover. Converting beech coppices into high forest through gradual thinning of shoots proves to be an effective step down the road to silvicultural systems characterized by continuous forest cover, as a tool of ecological intensification suitable to guarantee both public and private interests. Thinning has led to stands with fewer but larger stems, thus accelerating the long conversion process while maintaining both wood harvesting capability and environmental services.
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