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The cost of suppressing fires is known to be highly significant and increasing over time as a result of the indirect effects of climate change and rising human impacts. Their quantification is an essential component of an environmental accounting system, capable of providing updated information for policy design and implementation. The goal of this study was to provide an overview of the state-of-art of international literature on wildfire suppression costs. To this aim, a systematic literature review was carried out revealing that the largest amount of empirical data on suppression costs and related measures derived from North American case studies. Conversely, information on direct wildfire suppression cost categories is usually incomplete or missing throughout Europe, especially in fire-prone Mediterranean countries, even though these areas have been, and continue to be, severely impacted by wildfires, underlining the need to update research in this field, thereby supporting cost-effective fire management plans.

This dataset has been developed during the implementation of the project"Processes and products innovation of the chestnut chain of custody for structural use and improvement of mechanical resistant classes of solid wood" developed by the Lazio Region with the Rural Development Plan 2007-2013 in the Measure n. 124 - Cooperation.The project involved Forest owners, Logging companies, Laminated beam company while the scientific partners were the University of Tuscia and the National Research Council (CNR-IVALSA). The data set report the market price of the main laminated timber beams trade in the Lazio Region and the density for the timber species.&nbsp

International audience; Understanding how forest biodiversity and carbon stocks can be simultaneously maintained or enhanced is crucial for the development of effective forest management strategies and policies aimed at halting biodiversity loss under climate and land use change. Many existing policies and strategies assume that forests hosting high carbon stocks provide co-benefits in terms of high biodiversity. While this relationship has been demonstrated in tropical forests, it has not been rigorously assessed in temperate forests, and further research is needed to understand how carbon stock and biodiversity covary, and whether non-linearities, community thresholds and variability across taxa exist. We built a comprehensive biodiversity dataset including six taxonomical groups (beetles, birds, bryophytes, fungi, lichens, and vascular plants) distributed over 352 plots representing three forest types, in 22 distinct study areas across three European countries (France, Hungary and Italy). We used Boosted Regression Trees and Threshold Indicator Taxa ANalysis (TITAN) to address three questions: (1) is there a positive relationship between overall multi-taxa diversity (multidiversity) and aboveground carbon stocks in European temperate forests? (2) Are there nonlinearities or thresholds (e.g. synchronous change-points in species composition) along the carbon stock gradient we considered, and are they consistent across taxonomical groups and forest types? (3) How do individual species respond to increasing aboveground carbon and how does the proportion of species with positive (win-win species) or negative (trade-off species) relationships vary across taxonomical groups? We found neither higher multidiversity, nor a consistently higher number of species across the six taxonomical groups in forests storing higher aboveground carbon. We found evidence for synchronous change-points in community composition along the carbon gradient, although these were neither consistent, nor equally abrupt across taxonomical groups and forest types. For all taxonomical groups except lichens, trade-off species markedly decreased at carbon stocks between 80 and 110 Mg/ha, roughly corresponding to the canopy closure phase of the forest stand development. The turnover between trade-off and win-win species was gradual along the carbon gradient, and the proportion of these two groups of species varied across taxonomical groups, and forest types. Maximizing forest carbon storage may not benefit all facets of biodiversity at the same time, although it may enhance some specific taxa and functional groups. Explicitly distinguishing between win-win and trade-off species, and considering taxon-specific community change-points along the carbon gradient could provide a conceptual basis for forest managers to operatively reconcile biodiversity conservation and carbon stock retention.

A general trend of scrub encroachment and natural forest expansion (old-field succession) has been occurring in the past fifty years in Mediterranean mountain areas. While this phenomenon enhances a series of ecological processes and environmental services, it may represent a threat for biodiversity conservation when occurring on high nature value (HNV) extensive farmland. These open areas, created by traditional farming systems, have been recognized as a critically important European biodiversity resource. Understanding the drivers of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) and their implications on the dynamics of forest and HNV farmland habitats plays a crucial role in biodiversity conservation in protected areas. In this perspective, the case study here presented aims to model recent (1989-2008) LUCC in a National Park of the Central Apennines (Italy) and to produce a mid-term forecast (2008-2020). In the past twenty years, 57% of the land uptake by shrubland and 46% by forest has been occurring on former HNV farmland. Mid-term projections (2008-2020) confirm further HNV farmland decline. Localization of HNV farmland habitats vulnerable to change is a valuable decision-making tool to tradeoff in protected areas the conservation of traditional landscapes with the increase of forest and shrubland areas. In this perspective, concrete socio-economical and silvicultural measures are outlined to preserve these socially and economically-fragile open habitats.

The aim of this work is to test the potential of SPOT5 satellite images for monitoring coppice clearcuts. The clearcuts, delineated by on screen interpretation of the satellite images, are compared with the administrative statistics reported for a sample of 230 administrative units. Administrative statistics result significantly lower than those by satellite images, with an average ratio between clearcut area observed by SPOT5 images within each sample unit and the corresponding administrative statistics equal to 1.45. The underestimation by the administrative data is likely due to the simplified process of authorization of coppice clearcuts as well as the eventual lack of timeliness and/or loss of data that sometimes hinder the information flow from administrative bodies to National Forest Service, that is in charge of feeding the official forest statistics. In the light of the experimentation carried out, an operational procedure by SPOT5 images is proposed for the statistical calibration of administrative data about coppice clearcuts. L'articolo è disponibile sul sito dell'editore www.sisef.it

Since adequate information on the distribution of biodiversity is hardly achievable, biodiversity indicators are necessary to support the management of ecosystems. These surrogates assume that either some habitat features, or the biodiversity patterns observed in a well-known taxon, can be used as a proxy of the diversity of one or more target taxa. Nevertheless, at least for certain taxa, the validity of this assumption has not yet been sufficiently demonstrated. We investigated the effectiveness of both a habitat- and a taxa-based surrogate in six European beech forests in the Apennines. Particularly, we tested: (1) whether the stand structural complexity and the herb-layer species richness were good predictors of the fine-scale patterns of species richness of five groups of forest-dwelling organisms (beetles, saproxylic and epigeous fungi, birds and epiphytic lichens); and (2) the cross-taxon congruence in species complementarity and composition between herb-layer plants and the target taxa. We used Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs), accumulation curves and Procrustes analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of these surrogates when species richness, complementarity and composition were considered, respectively. Our results provided a limited support to the hypothesis that the herb-layer plants and the stand structural complexity were good surrogates of the target taxa. Although the richness of the herb-layer plants received a stronger support from the data than structural complexity as a predictor for the general patterns of species richness, the overall magnitude of this effect was weak and distinct taxa responded differently. For instance, for increasing levels of herb-layer richness, the richness of lichens showed a marked increase, while the richness of saproxylic fungi decreased. We also found significantly similar complementarity patterns between the herb-layer plants and beetles, as well as a significant congruence in species composition between herb-layer plants and saproxylic fungi. Finally, when different stand structural attributes were considered singularly, only the total amount of deadwood received support from the data as a predictor of the overall species richness. At the fine scale of this study, herb-layer plants and stand structural complexity did not prove to be effective surrogates of multi-taxon biodiversity in well-preserved southern European beech forests. Rather than on weak surrogates, these results suggest that sound conservation decisions should be supported by the information provided by comprehensive multi-taxonomic assessments of forest biodiversity.