RESILFORMED - Resilience to climate changes in mediterranean forests
LIFE11 ENV/IT/000215
Object
Evaluation procedure for silvicultural interventions to improve the resilience of Mediterranean forests.
Objective
To provide forestry technicians with a procedure and standards for the implementation of silvicultural interventions useful for improving the resilience of forest stands in the Mediterranean area.
Good Practice Description
It consists of an evaluation form which, if properly filled in by a forestry technician, allows to define the current status of a forest stand in terms of resilience and to identify the optimal desirable status, to be pursued as a final goal in the long-term (30 years), short-term (5 years), and medium-term (15 years) period, through suitable silvicultural interventions.
The first two columns of the sheet contain the list of indicators to be examined and their description, the third column contains a summary indication of the "ideal" objectives to be pursued in the medium-long term. The fourth column requires a description of the status of the forest stand of interest with respect to each individual indicator. The logical procedure consists in hypothesizing a natural evolution of the stand in the time intervals considered and assessing whether this is sufficient to reach the optimal status. If it is not, it will be necessary to define the interventions to be implemented to modify and/or accelerate the dynamics towards the "ideal" condition.
The last two columns of the sheet are dedicated to the definition of the interventions that can be implemented, also indicating the specific objectives that can be achieved in the short and medium term.
The procedure must be repeated for all the indicators, and, therefore, the sum of the defined interventions provides a clear definition of the silvicultural actions to be undertaken in each case.
Territorial Context
The project was implemented all over the territory of the Sicily region. Different environments where the GP has been applied: from Mediterranean scrub areas to mountain beech woods. The forest ecosystems of Sicily are characterised by simplification and structural fragility, threatened by fires, grazing, irrational cuts and parasitic attacks. Climate change, together with improper forest management for those stands that grow in areas of greater fragility, constitute the main threat that the practice wants to tackle.
Replicability conditions
The evaluation form approach is universally applicable; however the form must be adapted according to the object of investigation (socio-economic and above all forest-environmental context) and to the objectives.
Dissemination material
From the LIFE GoProFor database, in the final part of the sheet, it is possible to download some material relating to the project, including the technical manual entitled: "Guidelines for the assessment of the resilience of Mediterranean forests to climate change".