Today wood and nonwood forest resources management meets and often clashes with environment and biological diversity protection. A main problem is to understand relationships between the different roles of forest biodiversity, site, and management parameters. A multivariate statistical analysis has been carried out in order to interpret relationships between some forest biodiversity components and forest inventory data. Several indices of floristic diversity, species abundance, and structural heterogeneity at stand level have been calculated. The different components of forest biodiversity were separated by principal components analysis. Relations between forest biodiversity indices and site and management attributes have been investigated by two multivariate statistical techniques: bivariate correlation analysis and multiple linear regression. Results showed a high correlation between all the investigated components of forest biodiversity and some topographic and/or forest management attributes. Results also gave ancillary information to define sustainable forest management criteria. © 2014 Società Botanica Italiana.

In last decades, numerous efforts have been carried out by the scientific community to assess the multifunctional role of forests in supporting the forest decision-making processes. Recently developed in Italy, the Forest Landscape Management Planning seems to be the most suitable tool to maintain the sustainability balance between forests and local populations. This research identifies and maps different forest ecosystem functions in a mountain Natura2000 Network site by performing a spatial estimation of forest inventory parameters, and implementing a multi-criteria and multi-level approach. Final results on mapping of forest functions show acceptable values of classification accuracy. © 2014 University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Black pine has been used often in central and southern Italy to reforest mountainous areas depleted by the intensive use of natural resources. The main purpose of establishing pine forests in Italy was to protect the soil from excessive erosion, and also to facilitate the natural succession toward mixed forests with deciduous species. The most common silvicultural treatments in Europe currently aim at maximizing the stability of the stands and facilitating the transition from pure to mixed stands comprising a larger component of native tree species. In this work, we investigated the relationships between the living whorls number and four indexes of individual tree stability: the slenderness ratio, the crown depth, the crown projection, and an eccentricity index of the canopy. The data set used was composed of 1098 trees from ten black pine plantations located in central Italy. Our results demonstrate that the living whorls number can be handily used to predict the slenderness ratio with an error of 18%. A non-parametric model based on a reduced number of field measures was obtained as a support for thinning operations aimed at improving single tree stability. © SISEF.