Tecniche innovative per l'inventariazione e il monitoraggio, l'implementazione dell'approccio sistemico nella gestione forestale

The shift towards the holistic approach in science and general thinking is rapidly taking place. This fact leads to an overhauling on the methods developed to study and build new knowledge in almost every scientific field. In forestry this change resulted in the theory of systemic silviculture. This theory critiques the old practices related to studying and managing forests and implements holism in researches and practices, challenging today’s climatic and social changes.For this new way of acting, where the forest is seen as complex adaptive system, monitoring represents the key issue in management and research. In turn, monitoring for complexity requires the capacity to constantly gather new data, improve data quantity and quality while reducing or avoiding survey costs.These objectives can be reached integrating customary forest mensuration procedures with new techniques to gather and process data. In this work we asses how auxiliary variables derived processing remote sensing images, both ALS and multispectral, can be implemented in the analysis of a typical coniferous plantation. Furthermore customary area-based surveys are compared with the integration of the line based sampling method and ALS metrics in several ways. Comparisons are extended to the estimation of density, basal area, mean height and volume. This work has shown that the use of more agile sampling approaches and these auxiliary variables has a great potential to reduce monitoring costs, improve estimates quality and extend information depth.