Foreword

It was the late summer of 2003 when we first travelled to Sardinia to set up traps in the forest of Marganai, an area owned by the regional administration, in the south-western part of the island. Our Centro Nazionale per lo Studio e la Conservazione della Biodiversità Forestale in Verona—a research institute of the Italian State Forestry Service—had been entrusted with the assessment of arthropod diversity in permanent monitoring sites of the ICP Forests network, a European body for long-term research in forest ecosystems (Mason et al. 2006). The project included a total of twelve forests in Italy, and we were setting up a standard sampling design at each site.