Gherardo Chirici

University of Florence | UNIFI · Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Agrarie Alimentari Ambientali e Forestali (DAGRI)

Key message This work analyses the rate of recovery of the spectral signal from clearcut areas of coppice Mediterranean forests using Landsat Time Series (LTS). The analysis revealed a more rapid rate of spectral signal recovery than what was found in previous investigations in boreal and temperate forests. ContextThe rate of post-disturbance veget...

Strong winds may uproot and break trees and represent a major natural disturbance for European forests. Wind disturbances have intensified over the last decades globally and are expected to further rise in view of the effects of climate change. Despite the importance of such natural disturbances, there are currently no spatially explicit databases...

Spatial predictions of forest variables are required for supporting modern national and sub-national forest planning strategies, especially in the framework of a climate change scenario. Nowadays methods for constructing wall-to-wall maps and calculating small-area estimates of forest parameters are becoming essential components of most advanced Na...

The lack of multi-dimensional data is one of the major gaps which limit the knowledge and the assessment possibilities of European forests. Nowadays, the most extensive and complete data on the European forest statuses are given by National Forest Inventories (NFIs) which provide information about the extent of forest’s resources and their composit...

Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, posing a threat to forest ecosystems and eliciting forest-pest outbreaks. In the southern Italian Alps, a dramatic windthrow called Vaia occurred in October 2018, shifting populations of the European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) from an endemic to an epidemic phase. Remote-se...

Wildfire regimes affected by global change have been the cause of major concern in recent years. Both direct prevention (e.g., fuel management planning) and land governance strategies (e.g., agroforestry development) can have an indirect regulatory effect on wildfires. Herein, we tested the hypothesis that active land planning and management in Ita...

Il settore forestale in Italia si trova ad affrontare problematiche legate alla necessità di valorizzare le opportunità ambientali, territoriali e socio-economiche. La ricerca è chiamata a tradurre i progressi tecnologici in applicazioni pratiche. Un ambito in forte sviluppo è quello della geomatica e delle tecnologie dell'informazione e comunicazi...

La gestione delle foreste e la programmazione del settore forestale necessitano di informazioni aggiornate e affidabili. In Italia non è ancora disponibile una mappa forestale a scala nazionale. In parte delle Regioni e Province Autonome sono state realizzate in modo indipendente carte forestali seguendo specifiche esigenze e normative locali. Nel...

Afforestation is one of the most effective processes for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combating global warming. Landsat data and machine learning approaches can be used to map afforestation (i) indirectly, by constructing two maps of the same area over different periods and then predicting changes, or (ii) directly, by constructi...

Afforestation processes, natural and anthropogenic, involve the conversion of other land uses to forest, and they represent one of the most important land use transformations, influencing numerous ecosystem services. Although remotely sensed data are commonly used to monitor forest disturbance, only a few reported studies have used these data to mo...

Biodiversity monitoring represents a major challenge to supporting proper forest ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. The latter is indeed shifting in recent years from single-species to multi-taxon approaches. However, multi-taxonomic studies are quite rare due to the effort required for performing field surveys. In this context, re...

Background Gradients in local environmental characteristics may favour the abundance of species with particular traits, while other species decline, or favour species with different traits at the same time, without an increase in average species abundances. Therefore, we asked: do variations in species and traits differ along gradients of deadwood...

Forest ecosystems’ structure and biomass monitoring are crucial for understanding the contribution of forests to the global greenhouse gas balance. NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission collects waveform lidar data to estimate Above Ground Biomass Density (AGBD). While of great interest, GEDI data are challenging to download...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a key role for improving the implementation of sustainable forest management at local, regional, and global level. The ICT potential to easily exploit a wider and more up-to-date set of information on the economic, environmental, and social value of forests is of relevant help for the daily work...

Several political initiatives aim to achieve net-zero emissions by the middle of the twenty-first century. In this context, forests are crucial as a carbon sink to store unavoidable emissions. Assessing the carbon sequestration potential of forest ecosystems is pivotal to the availability of accurate forest variable estimates for supporting interna...

The model-assisted difference and regression estimators are increasingly used with forest inventory and remotely sensed data to increase the precision of estimates of inventory parameters. Although these estimators date back at least 50 years and appear in multiple current sampling textbooks, the associated terminology is inconsistently defined, ev...

Within the Paris Agreement's Enhanced Transparency Framework, consistent data collections are the prerequisite for a successful reporting of GHG emissions. For such purposes, NFIs are usually the primary source of information, even if they are frequently not designed for producing estimations on a yearly basis and in the form of wall-to-wall high-r...

Snow cover is a key hydrological variable, critical to understanding water cycles and informing management decisions around resource extraction and recreational activities. Remote sensing open-access data and cloud-based computing platforms are two innovative tools for snow cover estimation. In this paper, we present SnowWarp, a processing framewor...

Chestnut coppices are among the formation most affected by fires in the Mediterranean environment. In the absence of cultivation treatments, the structure of the stands appears without vertical and horizontal interruptions in the canopy, with a considerable expansion of the fuel load. In this study, we showed the importance of silvicultural interve...

The study of afforestation is crucial to monitor land transformations and represents a central topic in sustainable development procedures, in terms of climate change, ecosystem services monitoring, and planning policies activities. Although surveying afforestation is important, the assessment of the growing forests is difficult, since land cover h...

Forests cover 30% of the Earth's landmass, host 80% of the biodiversity on land, and represent one of the main sinks of carbon. Studying forest ecosystems and dynamics is more crucial than ever now that the climate is changing. On the other hand, forest structural attributes and microhabitats data acquisition is challenging, and require huge effort...

Background Rapid climate changes lead to an increase in forest disturbance, which in turn lead to growing concerns for biodiversity. While saproxylic beetles are relevant indicators for studying different aspects of biodiversity, most are smaller than 2 mm and difficult to sample. This, together with a high number of species and trophic roles, make...

The Mediterranean basin is a well-known drought-prone region, nevertheless it has been affuected by unprecedented extreme climate events over the last decades which are projected to lead to an even drier and warmer climate in this region. Process-based forest models are versatile tools being able to simulate forest stand growth and structure under...

Large-scale forest monitoring benefits greatly from change detection analysis based on remote sensing data because it enables characterizing forest dynamics of disturbance and recovery by detecting both gradual and abrupt changes on Earth’s surface. In this study, two of the main disturbances occurring in Mediterranean forests, harvesting operation...

Forests absorb 30% of human emissions associated with fossil fuel burning. For this reason, forest disturbances monitoring is needed for assessing greenhouse gas balance. However, in several countries, the information regarding the spatio-temporal distribution of forest disturbances is missing. Remote sensing data and the new Sentinel-2 satellite m...

Il crescente interesse per la conservazione della biodiversità e degli ecosistemi, ha evidenziato l'importanza di ricorrere a pratiche gestionali capaci di aumentare la complessità strutturale e la diversità biologica dei sistemi forestali, favorendo la continuità ecologica e l'eterogeneità del paesaggio. In questo lavoro sono stati monitorati indi...

Monitoring progress in the Glasgow ‘Declaration on Forests’ remains impossible without open sharing of data. Three actions are required if this declaration is to succeed.

Forests play a prominent role in the battle against climate change, as they absorb a relevant part of human carbon emissions. However, precisely because of climate change, forest disturbances are expected to increase and alter forests’ capacity to absorb carbon. In this context, forest monitoring using all available sources of information is crucia...

A user-friendly and affordable broad-band digital Near Infrared (NIR) camera (Canon Pow-erShot S110 NIR) was compared with a narrow-band reflectance spectrometer (USB2000, Ocean Optics) at leaf scale for monitoring changes in response to drought of three ecologically contrasting Quercus species (Q. robur, Q. pubescens, and Q. ilex). We aimed to (a)...

Forest parameter estimation is required to support the sustainable management of forest ecosystems. Currently, forest resource assessment is increasingly linked to auxiliary information obtained from remote sensing (RS) technologies. In forest parameter estimation, airborne laser scanning (ALS) data have been demonstrated to be an invaluable source...

Forest disturbance monitoring is critical for understanding forest-related greenhouse gas emissions and for determining the role of forest management in mitigating climate change. Multiple algorithms for the automated mapping of forest disturbance using remotely sensed imagery have been developed and applied; however, variability in natural and ant...

La biodiversità forestale può essere monitorata attraverso indicatori come i microhabitat ed il le-gno morto, che costituiscono il substrato fertile per lo sviluppo delle specie saproxiliche. Tra i primi utilizzatori di queste nicchie ecologiche ci sono artropodi, uccelli e piccoli mammiferi, anche se gli insetti, ed in particolare i Coleotteri, so...

Forest condition, biodiversity, and ecosystem services are strongly interlinked. The biodiversity levels depend to a large extent on the integrity, health, and vitality of forests at the same time as losses of forest biodiversity lead to decreased forest productivity and sustainability. Under this conceptual framework, this study presents a methodo...

Monitoring of tree traits and tree response to the environment can be integrated with sensor technology. High-resolution monitoring requires a frequent data acquisition, that generally results in hourly measurements for the definition of daily processes, then scaled at monthly, seasonal and annual levels, by producing very large databases. The Tree...

Although estimating forest disturbance area is essential in the context of carbon cycle assessments and for strategic forest planning projects, official statistics are currently not available in several countries. Remotely sensed data are an efficient source of auxiliary information for meeting these needs, and multiple algorithms are commonly used...

Accurate measurement of forest growing stock is a prerequisite for implementing Climate-Smart Forestry strategies. This study deals with the use of Airborne Laser Scanning data to assess carbon stock at the tree level. It aims to demonstrate that the combined use of two unsupervised techniques will improve the accuracy of estimation supporting sust...

Forest harvesting in Europe: a healthy scientific debate Is forest harvesting increasing in Europe? There is scientific debate about methodological approach and data regarding clearcut increment in Europe but, besides the discussion, there is a general agreement about the need to collect reliable scientifically robust remote sensing data for sound...

The study of land cover and land use dynamics are fundamental to understanding the radical changes that human activity is causing locally and globally and to analyse the continuous metamorphosis of landscape. In Europe, the Copernicus Program offers numerous territorial monitoring tools to users and decision makers, such as Sentinel data. This rese...

Tree-related microhabitats (hereafter TreMs) are structures occurring on trees, such as rot holes, cavities, large nests, mould, fruiting bodies and myce-lia of decomposer fungi. TreMs have been widely recognized as important sub-strates and structures useful for biodiversity conservation in forest ecosystems , and they can be used as indicators fo...

The relationships between structural complexity, deadwood abundance, microhabitat type and species-diversity indicators are excellent tools to monitor biodiversity in forest ecosystems. In spite of their importance, correlations between structural traits and Coleoptera communities in Mediterranean mountain forests have only rarely been investigated...

Ceccherini et al.1 reported an abrupt increase in harvested forest—in terms of both biomass and area—in Europe from 2016, and suggested that this reflected expanding wood markets encouraged by the bioec- onomy policies of the European Union (EU). They used Global Forest Watch2 and GlobBiomass3 data together with an analysis that sought to remove na...

• Key message Natural disturbances and management are key drivers for forest carbon balance. We modelled the impact of Vaia storm on forest sink at national scale in Italy. We demonstrate that after Vaia, carbon fluxes among pools and through harvested wood products from salvage logging limit the carbon losses. Our findings can improve the effectiv...

Forest planning, forest management, and forest policy require updated, reliable , and harmonized spatial datasets. In Italy a national geographic Forest Information System (FIS) designed to store and facilitate the access and analysis of spatial datasets is still missing. Among the different information layers which are useful to start populating a...

Information about forest cover and its characteristics are essential in national and international forest inventories, monitoring programs, and reporting activities [...]

Model-assisted estimation of forest wood volume is approached exploiting the wall-to-wall information available from satellite data and partial information achieved from airborne laser scanning (ALS) covering a portion of the survey area. If the portion covered by ALS is selected by a probabilistic sampling scheme, two-phase estimators are consider...

The dataset reports data collected in 38 square (50 x 50m) 0.25 ha plots representative of poplar plantations in Lombardy Region (Northern Italy), which were used to calibrate optical information derived from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite (Sentinel-2) sensors. In each plot, the diameter at breast height was measured using a caliper; h...

Different forest types based on different tree species composition may have similar spectral signatures if observed with traditional multispectral satellite sensors. Hyperspectral imagery, with a more continuous representation of their spectral behavior may instead be used for their classification. The new hyperspectral Precursore IperSpettrale del...

Worldwide, tropospheric ozone (O3) is a potential threat to wood production, but our understanding of O3 economic impacts on forests is still limited. To overcome this issue, we developed an approach for integrating O3 risk modelling and economic estimates, by using the Italian forests as a case study. Results suggested a significant impact of O3 e...

L'agricoltura costituisce da sempre una grande minaccia per gli ecosistemi naturali del nostro pianeta, e non solo in quanto attività umana essenziale per la produzione di cibo. Attualmente, in particolare nella regione tropicale e sub-tropicale, le attività agricole sono fattori di pressione cruciali per il mante-nimento dei cicli di vita di ecosi...

The frequency of extreme storm events has significantly increased in the past decades, causing significant damage to European forests. To mitigate the impacts of extreme events, a rapid assessment of forest damage is crucial, and satellite data are an optimal candidate for this task. The integration of satellite data in the operational phase of mon...

Accurate estimates of canopy cover (CC) are central for a wide range of forestry studies. As direct measurements are impractical, indirect optical methods have often been used to estimate CC from the complement of gap fraction measurements obtained with restricted-view sensors. In this short note we evaluated the influence of the image pixel resolu...

A Landsat time series has been recognized as a viable source of information for monitoring and assessing forest disturbances and for continuous reporting on forest dynamics. This study focused on developing automated procedures for detecting disturbances in Mediterranean coppice forests which are characterized by rapid regrowth after a cut. Specifi...

Forest growing stock volume (GSV) is an important parameter in the context of forest resource management. National Forest Inventories (NFIs) are routinely used to estimate forest parameters, including GSV, for national or international reporting. Remotely sensed data are increasingly used as a source of auxiliary information for NFI data to improve...

Forest growing stock volume (GSV) is an important parameter in the context of forest resource management. National Forest Inventories (NFIs) are routinely used to estimate forest parameters, including GSV, for national or international reporting. Remotely sensed data are increasingly used as a source of auxiliary information for NFI data to improve...

Forest growing stock volume (GSV) is an important parameter in the context of forest resource management. National Forest Inventories (NFIs) are routinely used to estimate forest parameters, including GSV, for national or international reporting. Remotely sensed data are increasingly used as a source of auxiliary information for NFI data to improve...