Piermaria Corona

Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l'analisi dell'economia agraria (CREA - Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Italy)

Using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, environmental benefits in terms of CO2 stored in chestnut wood in Italy have been calculated. Using one of the methodologies proposed under the LCA umbrella, a physical and formal balance sheet of CO2 has been built. Chestnut forests (Castanea sativa Mill.) are one of the most critical forest types in...

La necessità di gestire il dinamismo del paesaggio forestale italiano, significativamente segnato dalla crescente estensione delle superfici boschive, e, al contempo, la fruizione delle utilità ecosistemiche fornite dal bosco ha condotto all’aggiornamento della legislazione forestale con specifico riferimento anche al tema del paesaggio: in partico...

La necessità di gestire il dinamismo del paesaggio forestale italiano, significativamente segnato dalla crescente estensione delle superfici boschive, e, al contempo, la fruizione delle utilità ecosistemiche fornite dal bosco ha condotto all’aggiornamento della legislazione forestale con specifico riferimento anche al tema del paesaggio: in partico...

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...

Questo studio nasce a supporto della pianificazione territoriale in campo energetico e si propone i seguenti obiettivi: i) quantificare l’estensione delle aree marginali (AM) potenzialmente coltivabili con colture da biomassa ad uso energetico; ii) stimare le quantità di acqua necessaria alla produzione di dette colture; iii) stimare le quantità di...

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...

Pyrosilviculture and understory fuel management to reduce forest stand and landscape flammability represent loss-making interventions from an economic point of view. Consequently, prevention is carried out above all on public property and with public funds (e.g. Rural Development Programs), while the interest of the private individual for preventio...

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...

A completely data‐driven, design‐based sampling strategy is proposed for mapping a forest attribute within the spatial units tessellating a survey region. Based on sample data, a model is selected, and model parameters are estimated using least‐squares criteria for predicting the attribute of interest within units as a linear function of a set of a...

Le reti di imprese possono rappresentare un efficace strumento di promozione e valorizzazione delle potenzialità selvicolturali e delle filiere forestali. Dopo una presentazione del contratto di rete quale strumento di cooperazione tra imprese, questo lavoro analizza la disciplina specifica dettata per le reti agricole, per poi illustrare la rispos...

The European Union Rural Development Program (RDP) is a major driver of landscape change over time in Europe. In a context of climate and land use changes and consequent fire risk exacerbation, understanding the possible contribution of RDP measures to wildfire risk mitigation could help planning subsidies allocation criteria in a more efficient wa...

This paper presents the application of a recently proposed modelling strategy to yield high spatial resolution estimates of net forest carbon fluxes in Tuscany (Central Italy). The simulation of forest net primary production (NPP) and net ecosystem production (NEP) is based on the combination of remotely sensed and ancillary data which describe the...

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...

NASAs Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is collecting space-borne full waveform lidar data with a primary science goal of producing accurate estimates of forest aboveground biomass density (AGBD). This paper presents the development of the models used to create GEDIs footprint-level (~25 m) AGBD (GEDI04_A) product, including a descript...

is collecting spaceborne full waveform lidar data with a primary science goal of producing accurate estimates of forest aboveground biomass density (AGBD). This paper presents the development of the models used to create GEDI's footprint-level (~25 m) AGBD (GEDI04_A) product, including a description of the datasets used and the procedure for final...

Wildfire risk prevention through fuel management generally lack of economic sustainability. In marginal areas of southern Europe, this limits fire prevention programs to reach the critical mass of interventions required to modify landscape flammability, the fire regime and its impacts.This study investigates key fuel management initiatives for wild...

The world production of chestnuts has significantly grown in recent decades. Consumer attitudes, increasingly turned towards healthy foods, show a greater interest in chestnuts due to their health benefits. Consequently, it is important to develop reliable methods for the selection of high-quality products, both from a qualitative and sensory point...

Poplars are one of the most widespread fast-growing tree species used for forest plantations. Owing to their distinct features (fast growth and short rotation) and the dependency on the timber price market, poplar plantations are characterized by large inter-annual fluctuations in their extent and distribution. Therefore, monitoring poplar plantati...

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...

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...

L’importanza dei boschi misti è sempre più riconosciuta a livello scientifico per la loro maggiore multifunzionalità rispetto ai popolamenti puri. Tuttavia, la mappatura dei popolamenti misti a scala di dettaglio rappresenta, al momento, una operazione non semplice con procedure semi-automatiche. Questa nota ha come obiettivo la presentazione di un...

Site conditions and forest management affect dendrometric parameters of chestnut ( Castanea sativa Mill.) coppices, but there is modest knowledge on the effect of stand dendrometric characters on physical and mechanical wood characteristics. The aim of this study was to verify these relationships in chestnut coppices that were 12–14 years old. Wood...

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...

In the recent decades, growing demand for wood products, combined with efforts to conserve natural forests, has supported a steady increase in the global extent of planted forests. In this paper, a two-phase sampling strategy for large-scale assessment of hybrid poplar plantations in Northern Italy was implemented. The first phase was performed by...

In recent history, both a growing awareness of how scientific and societal uncertainty impacts management decisions and of the intrinsic value of nature have suggested new approaches to forest management, with a growing debate in forest science over the need for a paradigmatic shift from the classic conventional worldview, based on determinism, pre...

Cities are responsible for more than 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Sequestration of air pollutants is one of the main ecosystem services that urban forests provide to the citizens. The atmospheric concentration of several pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO 2), tropospheric ozone (O 3), and particulate matter (PM) can be reduced by urba...

In Italy, forest tree crops cover an area of about 100,000 hectares of farmland: more than half are represented by specialized poplar plantations, while the remaining consists mainly of hardwood broadleaves plantations. The profitability of poplar and hardwood broadleaved plantations, assessed by field data collected on a representative number of p...

In the Mediterranean region, the coupled effect of recent changes in climatic features and an increase in human-related water demand induced a progressive reduction in the water level of many lakes. Consequently, intense withdrawals for public supply can affect the health of lake ecosystems and increase trees’ vulnerability to predicted drought int...

Key message The adoption of new silvicultural methods and approaches requires an understanding of the differences between those and “old” or “conventional” approaches, along with extensive training to break previous knowledge bias. Context Forestry is in transition towards ecosystem-based management, and new silvicultural approaches are appearing w...

The estimation of individual values (marks) in a finite population of units (e.g., trees) scattered onto a survey region is considered under 3P sampling. For each unit, the mark is estimated by means of an inverse distance weighting interpolator. Conditions ensuring the design‐based consistency of maps are considered under 3P sampling. A computatio...

Sustainability and ecotoxicity issues call for innovations regarding eco-friendly adhesives in the production of biocomposite wood materials, and solutions involving nano-scale and bio-based compounds represent a valid and promising target. One possible approach is to increase the performance of adhesives such as polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) or melamin...

This technical note describes a quick methodology to classify the phytodepurative potential of riparian forest stands. Some municipalities located within landscapes characterized by both intensive agricultural and industrial activities in Central Italy are considered as test areas. Starting from the on-screen interpretation of high-resolution digit...

Growing demand for wood products, combined with efforts to conserve natural forests, have supported a steady increase in the global extent of planted forests. Here, a two-phase sampling strategy for large-scale assessment of the total area and the total wood volume of fast-growing forest tree crops within agricultural land is presented. The first p...

Cork oak forests (Quercus suber L.) are one the most interesting forest ecosystems in the western Mediterranean Basin. The aim of this technical note is the presentation of the results of a recent survey carried out in the Calabria region (southern Italy) on the current distribution of cork oak forests. At present , there are few isolated forest st...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

The inland and mountain areas are territories characterized by conditions of infrastructural and socio-economic disadvantage, but at the same time rich in environmental and cultural resources. The Italian strategy for inland areas aims to enhance their natural and human capitals. In this context, this work aims to investigate whether and how the te...

Research Highlights: Chestnut trees’ (Castanea sativa Mill.) growth and their responses to climate are influenced by stand-characteristics and managements. This study highlighted that chestnut tree-ring growth is not particularly influenced by climate, while minimum temperature showed a positive relation with both intrinsic water-use efficiency (WU...

Water availability is a major limiting factor in plant productivity and plays a key role in plant species distribution over a given area. New technologies, such as terahertz quantum cascade lasers (THz-QCLs) have proven to be non-invasive, effective, and accurate tools for measuring and monitoring leaf water content. This study explores the feasibi...

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...

Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) is an important exotic tree species that was planted across a large part of Europe during the last century. In both experimental trials and conventional forest plantations, the trees grow at a high rate and produce high-quality timber. The present study investigated climate-growth relationships of...

Three quarters of the European population live in urban areas, which is expected to increase to over 80% by 2050. The well-being of urban citizens appears to be closely linked to the correlation between the growth of urban areas and to the availability of green spaces. The conservation and the enhancement of the Green Infrastructure (GI) can be con...

Key message ICP Forests relies on a representative pan-European network based on a 16 × 16 km grid-net covering around 6000 plots. Dead wood volumes for 3243 plots, related to 19 European Countries, are presented in this data paper as a result of harmonised sampling procedure, and under compliance with FAIR Data Principles. Dataset access is at htt...

Key message We provided long-term stand and canopy structural data from permanent monitoring plots representative of some most diffuse temperate and Mediterranean forests, under different coppice management regimes. Periodic inventories were performed in the surveyed plots since the 1970s. Annual litterfall production and its partitioning (leaf, wo...

Accurate inventory and mapping of olive (Olea europaea L.) tree attributes represents a central issue to support the olive production system. With reference to the cultivation, there is a high heterogeneity and complexity in the cultivation of olive trees, which is reflected in the large variability in olive grove surfaces. This poses some challeng...

Plants display a large number of traits which are reflected in physiological and ecological functions (functional traits). Leaf traits are amongst the most important functional traits. However, a great challenge in measuring leaf traits in the field is that direct methods are limited by the cost of the instruments and the time and work required by...

Mixed forests are particularly interesting for forest structure and diversity analyses, as higher complexity and diversity can be expected in these forests compared to pure ones. Integrating different approaches in the analyses of structure and diversity in these forests can provide complementary information on non-spatial, spatial and functional d...

Global changes push to set up strategies able to mitigate and adapt agricultural and forest crops to environmental variability, and the sustainable intensification of production processes under agricultural and forestry systems is one of the approaches mainly supported. In Italy biomass and biogas are the renewable energy sources that have shown th...

The future dynamics of forest species and ecosystems depend on the effects of climate change and are related to forest management strategies. The expected impacts of climate change are linked to forest growth and productivity. An increase in the length of the growing season and greater productivity are likely as well as shifts in average climatic v...

Wildfires, a key socio-environmental challenge in Mediterranean regions, are influenced by anthropogenic fac- tors shaping land-use and socioeconomic spatial structures. By assuming that the dominant socioeconomic struc- ture of local districts exerts a variable impact on wildfire spatial regimes, the present study investigates 174 indicators on a...

The present study presents a multidimensional analysis of land-use efficiency in terms of per-capita built-up area over 417 metropolitan regions from 27 European countries. The study period encompasses two urban phases including economic expansion (2000–2007) and crisis (2008–2015). Multiple geographical gradients were identified as relevant predic...

On October 29, 2019, the Vaia storm hits the North-Eastern regions of Italy by wind gusts exceeding 200 km h-1. The forests in these regions have been seriously damaged. This contribution illustrates the methodology adopted in the emergency phase to estimate forest damages caused by Vaia storm, both in terms of damaged forest areas and growing stoc...

Mark variograms are widely adopted in forest ecosystem studies for analyzing spatial interaction among trees. Inference on mark variograms can be performed under a model-dependent perspective (ergodic variograms) or under a deterministic perspective (non-ergodic variograms). A simple and workable definition of non-ergodic mark variogram is introduc...

Questo documento si inserisce nel contesto delle attività previste dalla Scheda Foreste n. 22.2 del programma Rete Rurale Nazionale 2014-2020, volte a supportare e favorire la politica di sviluppo rurale attraverso: • supporto alla partecipazione del partenariato, delle organizzazioni e delle amministrazioni all’attuazione della politica di svilupp...

La velocità dei cambiamenti globali in atto, unitamente alla complessità dei fenomeni in gioco, fa sì che le previsioni sulle condizioni future degli ecosistemi forestali siano piuttosto incerte. La consapevolezza di un futuro incerto ma certamente diverso motiva la ricerca di nuove soluzioni per la gestione sostenibile dei sistemi forestali. Accet...

L’analisi delle citazioni è un metodo bibliometrico comunemente utilizzato per valutare l’attività scientifica svolta da ricercatori e istituzioni in uno specifico campo di ricerca. In questo lavoro sono valutate e confrontate le riviste forestali italiane peer-reviewed - Annals of Silvicultural Research, Dendronatura, Forest@, iForest, L’Italia Fo...

La strategia nazionale per le aree interne contempla, tra gli obiettivi diretti a promuovere lo sviluppo, la valorizzazione dei sistemi agricoli e forestali mediante la costituzione di forme partenariali in grado di garantire una stretta cooperazione tra produzione primaria, trasformazione e commercializzazione e l’attivazione di filiere di energie...

On October 29th, 2018, storm Vaia hit forests in north-eastern Italy, causing the loss of 8 million cubic meters of standing trees and, more importantly, the sudden reduction of forest-related ecosystem services. Such event is not unprecedented: a similar storm had occurred in the same regions in 1966. Every year, an average of two extratropical st...

Italian stone pine is a landmark of Mediterranean coastal areas. Today, pinewoods represent environmental amenity areas at risk, being under siege from intensive urbanisation. We present an emblematic case study in Rome’s coastal strip where urban encroachment around pinewoods is somewhat overlooked by urban planning, which may be threatening for t...

Currently, about 70% of the forest land in Europe is covered by stands composed of two or more tree species. The similar situation can be found outside Europe too. While forest management of monocultures is well described, multispecies forests still need a better understanding to develop appropriate forest practice. Managing mixed forests can be mo...

The State of Mediterranean Forests 2018 analyzes the circum-Mediterranean region, a territory encompassing thirty-one countries and a wide range of political, economic, social and environmental contexts. The region has an extremely rich natural and cultural heritage. Here, human and economic development is largely dependent on at times scarce natur...

Shifts in government priorities in response to the 2007 global recession have affected wildfire management and natural disaster funding arrangements, leading to a reduced effectiveness of fire suppression actions and increasing fire vulnerability. Our study investigates the role of local socioeconomic contexts on fire suppression effectiveness unde...

Mediterranean forests in Europe, North Africa and the Near East are under pressure due to the combined effects of anthropogenic exploitation (fuel wood collection, overgrazing, agricultural conversion, etc.)and stress and disturbances related to climate change (drought, wildfires, pest and diseases) (seeChapter5). At the same time, Mediterranean fo...