Forest management and biodiversity, a new qualitative indicator to assess the naturalness of forest environments

In recent years, the loss of biodiversity occurred worldwide has called for the creation of various indicators aimed to assess the health status of the environment. Due to the increase of forest areas throughout Europe, different ecological indicators for the assessment of naturalness and health of forest ecosystems are being theorized and modelled, with relevant implications both for planning current and future management of forest ecosystems and to control their evolution over time. In this study, a new indicator of the ecological naturalness of forest habitats is proposed with the aim of providing an intuitive and straightforward tool for the harmonization and optimization of sampling efforts in similar projects (such as those proposed by Forest Europe). To this end, a limited number of variables concerning deadwood, climate, fauna, forest typology, and biotic and abiotic stress of trees have been combined into an indicator which reflects the overall health status and naturalness of forest ecosystems. Future studies and the collaboration between different research groups are desirable in order to validate the theorethical indicator proposed here and test its effectiveness and ease-of-use in projects focused on assessing the naturalness of forest ecosystems.