Modeling delineation and valuation of the Direct Protection Forest

Protection forests play a crucial role in mitigating the risk associated with gravity-driven natural hazards, such as rockfalls, landslides, and avalanches. These events pose a significant threat to human lives and socio-economic assets, especially in mountainous and densely populated regions. Among these, direct protection forests are of particular relevance, as they physically interact with hazardous processes, reducing their intensity and limiting downstream impacts. Despite their importance, systematically delineating and valuating their protective function at large scales remains a complex task due to the variability of environmental conditions and the high data requirements of existing methods. This thesis aims to develop a simple yet physically grounded approach for the delineation and valuation of direct protective forests, supporting regional and national-scale risk management and planning. The proposed methodology introduces a deterministic framework that leverages a reinterpretation of the energy line principle through equations of motion. This reformulation preserves the simplicity of the energy line principle, yet enables the generation of hazard trajectories using only one parameter, resulting in significantly improved spatial accuracy. This work proposes an integrated framework that combines the delineation of forests with a direct protective function and the adaptive valuation of their contribution to risk reduction within a single tool. Designed for application at regional and national scales, the resulting approach provides a practical support for decision-makers and forest managers, enabling targeted interventions and the prioritization of protection efforts where they are most needed.