ALPFOR-CSF

ALPFOR-CSF is a research project funded with a third-party grant in the framework of FORWARDS,  a large collaborative project funded by the European Union that will prototype the ForestWard Observatory, a pan-European monitoring and evaluation tool that will help in demonstrating the impact of climate change on forests, guiding decision-making for practical forest management. As part of its activities, FORWARDS has been establishing a network of climate smart forestry (CSF) and restoration pilots to provide science-based reference knowledge to guide forest management.

The objective of ALPFOR-CSF is to establish new field trials for long-term forest monitoring to assess the impact of climate smart forestry and adaptive management practices in forests of the Italian Alps. Our trials within three study areas cover several aspects of CSF in the Alps, such as the implementation of adaptations to management interventions in Norway spruce stands for composition enrichment and structure diversification to promote ecosystem functioning and improving the trade-off among timber production, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity conservation. In both control and CSF treatments, important variables will be collected pre- and post-treatment execution at both stand- and tree-level, such as diameter, tree locations, canopy structure, soil carbon, microclimate, deadwood amount, tree microhabitats, and regeneration. Ground- and UAV-based imagery techniques will be used to collect forest structure at stand-level data, while dendrometers and inventory-based methods will be used to monitor forest growth at the tree-level. These variables will be used to derive indicators of climate smart forestry and to quantify the potential for carbon mitigation of such practices. Simulation modelling will also be applied to predict future stand development under climate change. Finally, we will conduct a survey among the forest services regarding their perception on adaptive forest management and maintain an open data repository that will feed into the FORWARDS database.