Nuove metodologie d'indagine per "boschi nuovi": proposte e valutazioni applicative

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the spread of woods over lands as they were neglected by agriculture in Alpine and Prealpine areas has become an ever more important phenomenon. More recently this process has acquired notable proportions even in the South of Italy and in other areas of the Mediterranean basin. Here, however, climatic conditions and environmental pressures, such as repeated grazing and fires, determine secondary successional processes with a timescale and different ways of development, that are still little known. The methodologies and techniques conventionally used in the field of forestry are not very efficacious in the characterization of these formations, neither in terms of their territorial distribution nor in structural, constituent and quantitative terms. The research formulates and examines alternative methodologies both for large scale and for in-depth analysis. Examples of results on different levels have been produced that are relevant in distinct operational contexts, such as: planning at the forestry district level, quantification of the contribution of carbon uptake, characterization from the point of view of biodiversity and the recolonization incidence in relation to desertification processes.