Sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) bioclimatic suitability in Central Italy: future potential scenarios under climate change

The ecological and economic relevance of sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) has long been related to its wide geographical distribution and multipurpose products potential. In Central Italy and especially in Latium, sweet chestnut finds optimal environmental conditions for growth, supported by the application of traditional silvicultural practices. Thus, its distribution has been radically modified and controlled by man in order to manage it in profitable and diversified ways (e.g., by coppices or orchards) to produce a wide range of ecosystem services, marketable (wood, fruits) and not marketable (landscape, water regulation, etc.) products. Over the years, due to climate change, some productivity changes have been observed and new challenges are expected to manage and cultivate this species. Based on this background, this work aims at investigating the possible impacts of climate change on sweet chestnut in Central Italy in medium (2041-2060) and long term (2081-2100). Adopting a standard protocol for reporting species distribution model (ODMAP - Overview, Data, Model, Assessment, Prediction), four Earth System Models have been combined into two Shared Socio-economic Paths and two Time Horizons, to produce potential chestnut bioclimatic suitability maps. The outlined scenarios represent valuable information for future chestnut policy and management for defining specific strategies, considering the adaptive capacity of the species in terms of resilience from pathogenic attacks and response to innovative silvicultural treatments

A multi-temporal dataset of forest mensuration of reforestations: a case study in peri-urban Rome, Italy

The dataset supplied in this article provides data from continuous forest inventory carried out in the Castel di Guido estate, located in the Italian Tyrrhenian coast. The reforestation project started over 30 years ago using native and non-native species: 29 forested plot areas have been surveyed in 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2013 and 2017 where information about species and stem diameters have been collected for a total of 2’215 tree stems. The dataset also contains height-diameter curves modelled for 1997, 2006 and 2017 years to let the user to estimate growing stock and total biomass easily. These data can be exploited to assess net primary productivity, pollutant uptake, and as comparisons with other European artificial reforestations programs with similar species. The database is finalized to narrow the knowledge gap on long-term growth pattern of urban and peri-urban reforestations, providing comparative data on different species performances, grown in pure and mixed stands. Dataset and metadata here presented are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2633972

Forest deadwood in Europe

This dataset considers information from 3,243 ICP-Forests Level I plots collected between 2006 and 2008 in 19 European Countries: France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Latvia, Cyprus. The dataset provides standardized estimates of deadwood volume distinguished in five different deadwood components: standing and lying dead trees, snags, coarse woody debris, and stumps. The data allowed a traditional set of forest parameters to be extracted and that may be used to build relationship with other forest attributes, both quantitative and qualitative, to strength the knowledge of forest structure, diversity and species interactions naturally occurring in European forests. To the best of our knowledge it is the first dataset reporting measurements on deadwood at such large spatial scale in forest stands in Europe

Large-scale monitoring of coppice forest clearcuts by multitemporal very high resolution satellite imagery. A case study from central Italy

Reliable assessment of forest resource stock, productivity and harvesting is a commonly agreed objective of environmental monitoring programs. Distinctively, the assessment of wood harvesting has become even more relevant to evaluate the sustainability of forest management and to quantify forest carbon budget. This paper presents the development and testing of procedures for assessing forest harvesting in coppice forests by very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. The study area is located in central Italy over approximately 34,000 km2. A set of SPOT5 HRG multispectral images was acquired for the study years (2002–2007). Official administrative statistics of coppice clearcutswere also acquired.More than 9500 clearcuts weremapped and dated by on-screen interpretation of the SPOT5 images. In a subset of the study area various methods for semi-automatic clearcut mapping were tested by pixel- and object-oriented approaches. The following results are presented: (i) clearcut map developed by visual interpretation of the SPOT5 images resulted in high thematic (overall accuracy of 0.99) and geometric (rootmean square error of clearcut boundary delineation of 5.3 m) reliability; (ii) object-oriented approach achieved significantly better accuracy than pixel-based methods for semi-automatic classification of the coppice clearcuts; (iii) comparison between mapped clearcut area and official forest harvesting statistics proved a significant underestimation by the latter (65% of the total mapped clearcut area). A sample-based procedure exploiting VHR satellite imagery is finally proposed to correct the official statistics of coppice clearcuts.L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.sciencedirect.co

Monitoring the effects of extreme drought events on forest health by Sentinel-2 imagery

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Assessing and mapping biomass potential productivity from poplar-dominated riparian forests: A case study

River systems are subjected to continuous physical changes as a result of their sediment transport. River dynamics is mainly determined by the seasonal variation of weather conditions and, together with the nature of the catchment and land management, affects flow patterns on a local scale. Riparian vegetation is well adapted to this periodical disturbance. It naturally regenerates on the new mineral soil created by the redistribution of river sediments during floods, playing an important role in the maintenance of streams and riverbanks stability. The high level of resilience and productivity of riparian tree species like Populus, contributes to the rapid biomass accumulation of riparian vegetation making these ecosystems of potential interest for biomass production for energy. This paper presents an operational methodology for investigating the biomass potential from riparian forests by coupling airborne laser scanning data and field survey. A case study on assessing and mapping biomass dynamics over a seventeen year period along a tract on the Paglia river, in Central Italy, is presented and discussed. The results highlight that the surface of the poplardominated riparian vegetation has significantly changed over the 1989e2006 period. More than 70 ha of new poplar forest were naturally regenerated during the analyzed period. The total amount of aboveground woody biomass of the riparian forest at the second inventory occasion has been estimated in 88 Mg ha!1, evidencing a large amount of technically available resources for bioenergy production (around 80% of the standing woody biomass). The innovative strategy here proposed to assess and map at a very high spatial resolution the abovegroundwoody biomass of riparian forest meets the monitoring requirements to support energy production based on modern, non-conventional biomass harvest planning options