Thomas Campagnaro

University of Padua | UNIPD · Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry TESAF

This study examines the impact of ungulate browsing on the understory dynamics of the Cansiglio Forest, the only European beech high forest in the Southern Limestone Alps. Utilizing seven pairs of fenced versus unfenced forest stands established over two decades, we assessed how fencing affects understory structure and tree regeneration. Significan...

A large number of non‐native trees (NNTs) have been introduced globally and widely planted, contributing significantly to the world's economy. Although some of these species present a limited risk of spreading beyond their planting sites, a growing number of NNTs are spreading and becoming invasive leading to diverse negative impacts on biodiversit...

Forest biodiversity studies conducted across Europe use a multitude of forestry terms, often inconsistently. This hinders the comparability across studies and makes the assessment of the impacts of forest management on biodiversity highly context-dependent. Recent attempts to standardize forestry and stand description terminology mostly used a top-...

The European biodiversity and forest strategies rely on forest sustainable management (SFM) to conserve forest biodiversity. However, current sustainability assessments hardly account for direct biodiversity indicators. We focused on forest multi-taxon biodiversity to: i) gather and map the existing information; ii) identify knowledge and research...

Sweet chestnut forests in Europe are impacted by management abandonment, non-native species invasions and diseases, among other factors. Understanding the effects of these factors is crucial for forecasting future biodiversity changes, as well as proposing appropriate planning and management strategies. We studied sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa Mi...

Accessibility to urban green spaces is essential for urban dwellers’ health and well-being. For planning purposes different accessibility measures and indicators have been used. Some are only based on availability, others consider distance from residences, yet others rely on gravity-based methods that consider both supply and demand. Different indi...

Human effects on the water economy of the river systems are currently well documented at the worldwide scale, impacting a range of ecosystem services. In this perspective article, we discuss the findings of recent papers that under different intensities of human disturbance have coupled the analyses of riverine geomorphological and plant community...

Natura 2000 is a European network of protected sites that should enable natural habitats to be maintained or restored at a favorable conservation status. Progress toward this objective must be periodically reported by states members of the European Union. We investigated how forest management plans might provide data to support the reporting. The s...

In the context of global change, the integration of non-native tree (NNT) species into European forestry is increasingly being discussed. The ecological consequences of increasing use or spread of NNTs in European forests are highly uncertain, as the scientific evidence is either constraint to results from case studies with limited spatial extent,...

Capacity development is essential for the effective management of protected areas and for achieving successful biodiversity conservation. European Natura 2000 sites form an extensive network of protected areas and developing the capacity of staff at all levels is a priority that will positively influence the appropriate implementation of conservati...

Many forest tree species have been moved outside their native range to provide goods and services elsewhere, but some of them have become invasive, causing negative impacts on biodiversity and human activities. The assessment and knowledge on the degree and scale to which forest ecosystems are invaded by non-native trees is of paramount importance...

The Natura 2000 network, the pillar of biodiversity conservation in Europe, still shows some knowledge gaps after almost 30 years since its implementation. As birds are a taxonomic group that is underrepresented in the literature related to Natura 2000 compared to their importance in the EU Directives, this review investigated the characteristics o...

Forests host most terrestrial biodiversity and their sustainable management is crucial to halt biodiversity loss. Although scientific evidence indicates that sustainable forest management (SFM) should be assessed by monitoring multi-taxon biodiversity, most current SFM criteria and indicators account only for trees or consider indirect biodiversity...

Forests host most terrestrial biodiversity and their sustainable management is crucial to halt biodiversity loss. Although scientific evidence indicates that sustainable forest management (SFM) should be assessed by monitoring multi-taxon biodiversity, most current SFM criteria and indicators account only for trees or consider indirect biodiversity...

Aim Exploring the biotic homogenization and diversity resistance hypotheses by assessing the effect of non-native black locust canopy on understorey species turnover. Location Berlin, the Venetian metropolitan area, and Rome. Methods We modelled the zeta (ζ) expression of diversity to compare the understorey species turnover between the non-nativ...

Forests are a unique study ecosystem that can reveal global insights into the patterns and processes associated with biological invasions via their natural diversity, as well as their diversity of anthropogenic interactions. In this chapter we focus on emblematic species groups in different forest ecosystems, giving temperate and tropical examples...

Understanding and explaining the use of green spaces and forests is challenging for sustainable urban planning. In recent years there has been increasing demand for novel approaches to investigate urban green infrastructure by capitalizing on large databases from existing citizen science tools. In this study, we analyzed iNaturalist data to perform...

The Natura 2000 network of protected sites is the pillar of biodiversity conservation in Europe. Although the Natura 2000 network directly addresses birds, these have shown worrying declining trends. It is therefore crucial to assess the potential contribution of Natura 2000 conservation measures. In this paper, we use a replicable method to model...

The monitoring of environmental policies in Europe has taken place since the 1980s and still remains a challenge for decision- and policy-making. For forests, it is concretized through the publication of a State Of Europe's Forests every five years, the last report just been released. However, the process lacks a clear analytical framework and appe...

Urban forests have manifold social, economic, cultural and ecological benefits and are major components of the urban green infrastructure. Among them, spontaneous urban woodlands develop unintentionally on abandoned lands in both growing and shrinking cities and deserve additional attention. We aimed to describe the planning and social processes li...

Sustainably managed non-native trees deliver economic and societal benefits with limited risk of spread to adjoining areas. However, some plantations have launched invasions that cause substantial damage to biodiversity and ecosystem services, while others pose substantial threats of causing such impacts. The challenge is to maximise the benefits o...

Sustainably managed non-native trees deliver economic and societal benefits with limited risk of spread to adjoining areas. However, some plantations have launched invasions that cause substantial damage to biodiversity and ecosystem services, while others pose substantial threats of causing such impacts. The challenge is to maximise the benefits o...

Public urban green spaces are crucial for citizens’ wellbeing and are an important part of daily life in cities. To maximize their benefits to quality of life a thorough knowledge of citizens’ preferences and preference heterogeneity is crucial in the planning and design of urban green infrastructures. This study investigated visitors’ perception o...

Green spaces and trees are fundamental for the sustainability of cities. The use of management and planning indicators for green spaces, including urban forests, have been proposed, but are rarely applied and their potential to provide ecological, social, and economic benefits is usually overlooked by policy makers and managers. Here, we apply a se...

All’interno della Rete Natura2000, lo status di conservazione del 16% delle specie ornitiche non è notoed è considerato sfavorevole per un ulteriore 32%. Nel presente lavoro, tramite i dati forniti dal progetto nazionale di monitoraggio dell’avifauna nidificante”. L’indicatore Farmland Bird Index nei PSR 2014-2020” (FBI - dati 2009-2015) e dal prog...

Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus L.), a territorial galliform species, is known to prefer mature conifer stands with canopy gaps and a vigorous understory of ericaceous species. Capercaillie is a useful umbrella species that has recently shown declining population trends and distribution changes in its southern geographic range. We aim to identify an...

Many urban fallow lands are undergoing spontaneous plant succession and, over time, woodlands become established. These wild urban woodlands should be adequately recognised by urban planning, due to their potential role in providing ecosystem services, in light of the current challenges of sustainability and resilience to climate and land use chang...

The call to set aside half of Earth's surface for nature conservation is gaining momentum across the conservation community. We propose that the experiences of Earth's most extensive conservation network, Natura 2000, offers important lessons on the challenges and opportunities of scaling up area-based conservation strategies. Natura 2000 has made...

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...

Policies to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss often assume that protecting carbon-rich forests provides co-benefits in terms of biodiversity, due to the spatial congruence of carbon stocks and biodiversity at biogeographic scales. However, it remains unclear whether this holds at the scales relevant for management, with particularly lar...

Invasive alien tree species can strongly impact biodiversity and future projections predict their spread over natural, semi-natural and human habitats. However , little is known about plant communities that form during the first stages of invasion. We investigated the composition of plant communities in alien Robinia pseudoacacia L. secondary fores...

COST Action FP1403 NNEXT - International Conference "Non-native tree species for European forests", Vienna, Austria, 12-14 September 2018, book of abstracts, Pötzelsberger, E. (edt.); Spiecker H. (edt.); Hasenauer, H. (edt.); Konnert, M. (edt.); Mohren, G. M. J. (edt.); Gazda, A. (edt.).

Aim Biodiversity monitoring and conservation are extremely complex, and surrogate taxa may represent proxies to test methods and solutions. However, cross‐taxon correlations in species diversity (i.e., cross‐taxon congruence) may vary widely with spatial scale. Our goal is to assess how cross‐taxon congruence varies with spatial scale in European t...

The abandonment of agricultural use is a common driver of spontaneous reforestation by alien trees. The N-fixing black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) is a major alien invader of old fields in Europe. Here we show that canopy dominance by this tree may filter the frequency distribution of plant functional traits in the understory of secondary wood...

The ongoing biodiversity crisis necessitates greater efforts to ensure the adequate conservation of critical habitat types. Even though the identification of protected areas is still required in Europe, conservation efforts are now focusing on management requirements for protected areas and habitat types. Establishing effective management approache...

Historical data from forest management plans have the potential to shed light on changes driven by either the application or the abandonment of forestry practices. This information coupled with recent data allows temporal comparisons to be made between surveys at the same location. Here we present the temporal comparison of two forest compartments...

The abandonment of silvicultural activities can lead to changes in species richness and composition of biological communities, when compared to those found in managed forests. The aim of this study was to compare the multi-taxonomical diversity of two mature silver fir-beech-spruce forests in the southern Dolomites (Italy), corresponding to the Eur...

Improvements in the management of Natura 2000 sites are essential to achieve the targets set out by the Habitats and Birds Directives of the European Union. A current focus is on the development of management plans, which are fundamental instruments in the implementation of conservation measures. This study explores the viability of using existing...

Invasive alien species are a threat to protected areas, species, and habitats worldwide. At the European level, the control of invasive alien species is a major goal of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, and a cornerstone, in this sense, is the Regulation (EU) no.1143/2014 on invasive alien species. In this study, we focus on the Alpine and Continental...

Comparing the ecology of woody species in their alien and native ranges may provide interesting insights for theoretical ecology, invasion biology, restoration ecology and forestry. The literature which describes the biological evolution of successful plant invaders is rich and increasing. However, no general theories have been developed about the...

The abandonment of traditional anthropogenic activities is an important driver shaping landscape patterns. Therefore, multi-scale pattern analysis over time is needed to identify appropriate scales for biodiversity conservation and monitoring of abandoned landscapes. We compared spatial and temporal changes in a pair of alpine watersheds in Italy (...

Small woodlands and rural hedgerows, even though altered and fragmented, are fundamental elements of the traditional rural landscape as their structure and ecological functions allow the conservation of habitats and species. According to article 8 of the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC), Veneto region has recently approved the PAF (Prioritized Action...

On 1 January 2015 a new European regulation on invasive alien species entered in force. Key aspects of this regulation are the adoption of a list of invasive alien species which are of European Union concern, the requirement for specific prevention measures, the establishment of early detection and fast eradication measures, and the management of t...

We propose a method for the appropriate assessment of adverse effects of roads in compliance with the European Union Habitats Directive. The method incorporates an analysis of ecological risk of edge effects by the proposed roads with the related increase in accessibility. The method was tested on 30 km of planned forest roads inside an 8,000-ha re...

On 1 January 2015 a new European regulation on invasive alien species entered in force. Key aspects of this regulation are the adoption of a list of invasive alien species which are of European Union concern, the requirement for specific prevention measures, the establishment of early detection and fast eradication measures, and the management of t...

Woodland fragments, in small historical cities, are commonly regarded as temporary voids in an urban matrix, yet to be allocated a land-use, under city planning regulations. However, they could display relevant plant diversity, and contribute to urban ecosystem services. This study combined surveys at 100 m2, and at patch level, with the aim to inv...

Research on changes in biodiversity due to the abandonment of forestry is important in understanding the role of reserves in conservation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether changes have occurred in species richness, abundance and composition of ground, longhorn and bark beetles due to habitat changes as a result of the cessation of f...

Riassunto. La Rete Natura 2000 del Veneto ospita un notevole patrimonio di biodiversità: all'interno dei siti regionali sono segnalate 67 specie iscritte nell'Allegato II della Direttiva Habitat, di cui 12 prioritarie, e 103 specie iscritte nell'Allegato I della Direttiva Uccelli. Sono inoltre 76 gli habitat elencati nell'Allegato I della Direttiva...

The forest plan of the Boite district is an example of the possible integration of different approaches in order to set indications for forest management. Through stakeholders’ involvement and by applying multi--‐criteria analysis, this district forest plan identified the priority services over the whole forest area. The district forest plan has al...

This forest plan seeks to synthesize, transfer, and implement the best available knowledge on adaptation in both policy and practice, building on the results from previous projects and initiatives on adaptation to climate change in the Alps. By applying a knowledge-transfer concept driven by the information and communication needs of project target...

Here we summarise the findings of a study investigating the environmental, management, and land use factors that influence patterns of biodiversity in field margins in the Po Plain, Italy, and evaluate these habitats for their cultural and biodiversity value. We highlight four traditional management techniques of woody vegetation in field margins o...