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September 2000 - September 2016
January 2000 - March 2003
January 1999 - December 2012
Publications
Publications (526)
A critical challenge for urban forests is the arrival of Toumeyella parvicornis (or pine tortoise scale) in Italy, as this species damages stone pine (Pinus pinea L.), an emblematic Mediterranean species. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of remote-sensing data for monitoring pest invasions in the urban area of Rome, using Plan...
Among LULC products, tree cover maps are crucial tools to assess forest functionality and ecosystem services (ES), and implement sustainable forest management. Advances in remote sensing technologies continue improving maps’ accuracy, detail and proficiency. This study focuses on a novel high resolution tree cover mapping of Latium region, central...
Among the most significant impacts related to the spread of settlements and the densification of urban areas, the reduction in the availability of public green spaces plays a central role in the definition of livable cities, in terms of the environment and social cohesion, interaction, and equality. In the framework of target 11.7 of the Sustainabl...
Increased awareness of the importance of urban green spaces has led to an interest in studying ecology and biodiversity protection in populated areas. Urban environments face challenges such as the removal of dead wood, which threaten ecosystem functions.
This study examines biodiversity indicators in the urban environments of three Italian cities...
Durante una campagna di ricerca condotta per caratterizzare la struttura forestale, l’abbondanza di legno morto e dei microhabitat, sono stati raccolti tre coleotteri risultati nuovi per la fauna del Montenegro. In particolare, si segnala Rhysodes sulcatus Fabricius, 1787 (Coleoptera: Rhysodidae), Corticeus (= Hypophloeus) unicolor Piller & Mitterp...
The pressing nature of the climate crisis, along with the worries voiced by scholars, stakeholders, and the public about the impacts, reactions, and potential outcomes, has emphasized the need for a tool that allows ongoing monitoring of trees instead of depending solely on occasional measurements like in conventional forest evaluations. The GeoSci...
Le foreste urbane rappresentano un riferimento all’interno delle nostre città, migliorando la qualità della vita, grazie ai numerosi servizi ecosistemici che forniscono, e favorendo la salute fisica e mentale. Tra le maggiori minacce per queste aree ci sono le invasioni di parassiti, favorite dalle condizioni climatiche, che attaccano una vegetazio...
Nelle città, l’intensa gestione del territorio, l’inquinamento e la rimozione del legno morto dalle foreste urbane rappresentano una minaccia per numerose specie e per il funzionamento degli ecosistemi. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è esaminare gli indicatori di biodiversità negli ambienti urbani di tre città italiane, diverse per dimensione spaziale,...
Characterised by the presence of old and senescence trees, and providing several ecosystem services, old-growth forests are nowadays among the rarest European ecosystems. Despite the ecological importance of these forests, the small dimension of forest patches and the direct and indirect human actions, endangered these rare forests, so much so that...
The Mediterranean forests are known as among the richest biodiverse forest ecosystems due to their environmental heterogeneity. Human pressure and climate change are the main threats to these ecosystems compromising their functions. For this reason, ensuring the multifunctionality of forests is the greatest challenge for forest managers. Although t...
Invertebrates are central to structuring and maintaining the functioning of urban forests, which provide critical ecosystem services. Identifying the role of invertebrates in urban forests help reveal their importance to practitioners and the public, not only to preserve biodiversity but also to make the public aware of their functional importance...
Cities accommodate most of the global population making urban environment one of the most impacted by anthropogenic activities. The monitoring of biodiversity indicators in urban areas is therefore a sensible topic that generates significant interest. Even in an urban environment the approach the multi-taxon approach is frequently applied to correl...
At the end of 2014, the tortoise pine scale Toumeyella parvicornis (Cockerell) was recorded in Italy (Napoli) for the first time (Garonna et al., 2018). The insect rapidly spread attacking stone pine trees Pinus pinea L., a species representative of the Mediterranean landscape. In 2018, T. parvicornis was reported also in Rome and led to the decay...
La presente ricerca mira a valutare la multifunzionalità degli ecosistemi forestali in ambiente urbano e per-urbano, con lo scopo di conservare la biodiversità e aumentare la fruibilità di queste aree, favorendone l’uso a scopi ricreativi, turistici e sociali. In questo lavoro viene riportata la metodologia adottata per il monitoraggio dei rimbosch...
Negli ambienti urbani, l’intensa gestione del territorio, l’inquinamento e la rimozione del legno morto dalle foreste urbane rappresentano una minaccia per numerose specie e per il funzionamento degli ecosistemi.
Lo scopo di questo lavoro è di esaminare gli indicatori di biodiversità (struttura forestale, microhabitat degli alberi, coleotteri e ucc...
Accurate structural information about forests, including canopy heights and diameters, is crucial for quantifying tree volume, biomass, and carbon stocks, enabling effective forest ecosystem management, particularly in response to changing environmental conditions. Since late 2018, NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission has m...
In the managed beech forests of Central Italy (Molise), the diversity of saproxylic species is potentially under threat by intensive management. To evaluate the impact of forestry on the biodiversity of these ecosystems, we analyzed the relationship between abundance of saproxylic beetles and forest stand exposure and elevation, deadwood availabili...
Climate change influences the stability and health of
forests, impacting on forest structure, composition,
and functioning. European beech is one of the most
widespread and important tree species for the European
forest sector, and the impact of climate change
on this species was analysed through dendrochronology,
phenological monitoring, model dis...
Key message
The physiological responses expressed by variation in carbon and oxygen stable isotopes and iWUE in five provenances of maritime pine grown in four common gardens were primarily determined by genotype differences in phenotypic plasticity and secondarily by genotype.
Abstract
Given the impacts of climate change on forest resources and c...
In this study we evaluated the effects that currently in-use sylvicultural practices have on the tree features affecting biodiversity indicators in high beech forests in the Tuscan Apennines. The field work was carried out in five study areas: three areas with different age managed with the uniform shelterwood system, one area managed with the sing...
Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) technology characterizes standing trees with millimetric precision. An important step to accurately quantify tree volume and above-ground biomass using TLS point clouds is the discrimination between timber and leaf components. This study evaluates the performance of machine learning (ML)-derived models aimed at disc...
Integrating the conservation of biodiversity into silvicultural practices is one of the main challenges facing forest owners in the promotion of an emergent approach to sustainable forest management across European forests. The Mediterranean forests are among the richest biodiverse forest ecosystems due to their environmental heterogeneity, but cli...
The attention of the new EU Forest Strategy for 2030 is focused on developing sustainable strategies to revert biodiversity loss in managed forests. In the managed beech forests of Central Italy (Molise), the diversity of saproxylic species is under threat by intensive management and interventions are needed to revert this negative trend. To evalua...
In the managed beech forests of Central Italy (Molise), the diversity of saproxylic species is potentially under threat by intensive management. To evaluate the impact of forestry on the biodiversity of these ecosystems, we analyzed the relationship between abundance of saproxylic beetles and (i) forest stand exposure and elevation, (ii) deadwood a...
Il presente documento sintetizza i contenuti e gli orientamenti essenziali del progetto di ricerca EUFORICC per proporre modelli, programmi, metodi e protocolli metodologici volti a sostenere la pianificazione, la gestione e la progettazione del verde urbano, mediante l’adozione di soluzioni basate sulla natura, con particolare riferimento agli alb...
Durante lo svolgimento del progetto PRIN EUFORICC (Establishing Urban FORest based solutions In Changing Cities), le numerose ricerche compiute in concerto tra le sei unità di ricerca afferenti al progetto hanno contribuito ad individuare una lista di indicatori per il monitoraggio e la gestione delle foreste urbane. Il monitoraggio delle sfide soc...
Esiti del progetto PRIN EUFORICC - Establishing Urban FORest based solutions In Changing Cities: a) Linee Guida - Esperienze di ricerca e indicazioni operative dedicate alla realtà degli ambienti urbani italiani e mediterranei per la realizzazione, manutenzione e riqualificazione di foreste urbane e infrastrutture verdi. b) Indicatori - Indicatori...
A change in local environmental characteristics may: favour the abundance of species with special traits, while other species decline; or favour species with different traits at the same time, without andiamo increase in average species abundances. In this work, we analysed the beetle assemblage over five forest sites located protected areas along...
Biodiversity monitoring represents a major challenge to support forest ecosystems. In this context, remote sensing is a powerful tool, continuously providing free data at a different range of spatial and temporal scales. In particular, Sentinel-2 (S2) mission has great potential to produce reliable proxies for biological diversity. In the Gran Sass...
Land cover monitoring is crucial to understand land transformations at a global, regional and local level, and the development of innovative methodologies is necessary in order to define appropriate policies and land management practices. Deep learning techniques have recently been demonstrated as a useful method for land cover mapping through the...
Worldwide, national governments and private organizations are increasingly investing in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) to foster both human well-being and biodiversity while achieving climate and environmental targets. Yet, investments in NBS remain uncoordinated among planning levels, their co-benefits underestimated, and their effectiveness undermi...
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...
For the first time in human history, over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. This rapid growth makes cities more vulnerable, increasing the need to monitor urban dynamics and its sustainability. The aim of this work is to examine the spatial extent of urban areas, to identify the urban–rural continuum, to understand urbanization p...
Knowledge acquisition on the response of tree species to drought in the Mediterranean hotspot is an important step to guide adaptation strategies to climate change impacts, e.g., assisted migration. We assessed the resilience components—i.e., resistance, recovery, and resilience–to drought in 2003 in five provenances of maritime pine planted in fou...
Increasing the availability of greenspaces in built-up areas (GSB) is one of the main challenges to improving sustainability and livability in urban landscapes. Concurrently, the availability of brownfields and permeable spaces offers the chance to increase sustainability through the implementation of Nature-Based Solutions. This work aims to evalu...
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...
In recent years, deep learning (DL) algorithms have been widely integrated for remote sensing image classification, but fewer studies have applied it for land consumption (LC). LC is the main factor in land transformation dynamics and it is the first cause of natural habitat loss; therefore, monitoring this phenomenon is extremely important for est...
Spadoni GL, Moris JV, Vacchiano G, Elia M, Garbarino M, Sibona E, Tomao A, Barbati A, Sallustio L, Salvati L, Ferrara C, Corona P, Marchetti M, Motta R, Ascoli D. 2022. Active land management mitigates wildfires impacts in Italy. Fire Ecology Across Boundaries, 4-7 October, Florence (Italy).
Introduction
Biodiversity monitoring represents a major challenge in forest ecosystems and where conservation strategies have shifted from single-species protection toward a multi-taxon approach. Multitaxonomic studies linking biodiversity to forest structural variables are quite rare, due to the effort required for field surveys. In this context,...
Forest ecosystems strongly contribute to the mitigation of climate change impacts through the carbon stored in forests and through harvested wood products, such as sawed wood and furniture, which are obtained from many types of timber assortments. Timber assortments are defined as log sections of specific dimensions (log length and maximum/minimum...
The recognition of the key role of forests in contrasting the dramatic effects of climate change and biodiversity crisis is the pillar of many initiatives on a global , European, and national scale calling for afforestation campaigns. The Ita-lian forest nursery sector is currently inadequate to meet the demand for tree seedlings for the national c...
Forests are the principal sinks of terrestrial biodiversity and provide many ecosystem services. The Mediterranean forests, due to environmental heterogeneity are considered a very important biodiversity hotspot. Over the years, the abandonment of rural and mountain areas, in addition to human actions and climate change, strongly impact on forest e...
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...
La biodiversità forestale rappresenta l’insieme di tutte le forme di vita presenti nelle aree forestali e il ruolo ecologico che queste svolgono, ed è il risultato di una serie di processi evolutivi millenari tutt’oggi in continua evoluzione.
Le foreste italiane, grazie all’eterogeneità ambientale che caratterizza il nostro Paese, presentano un’ele...
The European Union aims to provide as much as one quarter of its transportation fuels via biofuels derived from renewable sources by 2030. To put this into perspective, the Italian government has recently established an ambitious goal to support the wider uptake of advanced second-generation biofuels, including cellulosic biofuels for the transport...
The European Union is significantly investing in the Green Deal that introduces measures to guide Member States to face sustainability and health challenges, especially employing Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in urban contexts. National governments need to develop appropriate strategies to coordinate local projects, face multiple challenges, and max...
Since February 2022, the National Forestry Strategy (NFS) for the forest sector and its supply chains is public. The NFS addresses in an innovative and science-based way key issues related to forest fire governance such as the integrated fire risk management, the convergence of forest, agro-pastoral and nature conservation policies with fire govern...
Multiple environmental stressors threaten the environmental quality in urban areas. Several policies were implemented in Italy to improve environmental quality, following the rationale that the more populated municipalities need high intervention priority and funds. Nevertheless, this approach not necessarily ensures to address real environmental c...
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...
Purpose of Review
This paper aims to retrace the most significant management strategies adopted across European beech forests over the last 25 years, highlighting those that are most efficient and promising. We investigate five main topics including forest management, forest models, species mixture, genetic, and regeneration.
Recent Findings
Europ...
Timber assortments are some of the most important goods provided by forests worldwide. To quantify the amount and type of timber assortment is strongly important for socio-economic purposes, but also for accurate assessment of the carbon stored in the forest ecosystems, regardless of their main function. Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) became a pr...
Agriculture has always been a major threat to natural ecosystems, despite being essential for human food production. At present, particularly in the tropical and sub-tropical regions, agricultural activities are major pressure factors on forests and on the life cycles’ conservation of such crucial ecosystems. Contemporary societies, essentially urb...
It is commonly believed that wildfires in southern Europe have been favored by the encroachment of flammable vegetation on cultivated and grazed areas no longer managed as a consequence of deep socioeconomic changes in rural areas. Using the whole of Italy as study case, this paper explores the hypothesis that wildfires selectively burn areas with...
Tropical forests are being destroyed to make space for agricultural activities with the assumption that they are required to feed the growing global population. Consequently, more sustainable practices are needed to guarantee food security and environmental protection of highly threatened natural biodiversity hotspots like the Amazon rainforest. Ca...
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...
L’importanza dei popolamenti forestali nelle fasi più evolute della successione ecologica è da tempo ampiamente riconosciuta. Oltre alla crescente consapevolezza della loro rilevanza come serbatoi di carbonio e come elementi del paesaggio, le foreste rappresentano un elemento chiave delle strategie di conservazione. Alcuni autori stimano che la bio...
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...
Land Use and Land Cover Changes (LULCC) are recognized among the main drivers affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Especially in areas with high biophysical and socioeconomic heterogeneity, the need to find optimal planning solutions to combine human and natural systems still remains an open issue. This study aims to investigate how diffe...
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...
Information about forest cover and its characteristics are essential in national and international forest inventories, monitoring programs, and reporting activities [...]
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...
Vaia storm facing the unbearable lightness of forest reporting Recently published data on Italian forest removals from FAO and EUROSTAT are still ridden with inaccuracies and underestimation. In this work we show how and why the Italian forestry data collection system is in itself unreliable. This represents a major obstacle for designing sector po...
