Mariagrazia Agrimi

Extending large-scale forest inventories to assess urban forests

Urban areas are continuously expanding today, extending their influence on an increasingly large proportion of woods and trees located in or nearby urban and urbanizing areas, the so-called urban forests. Although these forests have the potential for significantly improving the quality the urban environment and the well-being of the urban population, data to quantify the extent and characteristics of urban forests are still lacking or fragmentary on a large scale. In this regard, an expansion of the domain of multipurpose forest inventories like National Forest Inventories (NFIs) towards urban forests would be required. To this end, it would be convenient to exploit the same sampling scheme applied in NFIs to assess the basic features of urban forests. This paper considers approximately unbiased estimators of abundance and coverage of urban forests, together with estimators of the corresponding variances, which can be achieved from the first phase of most large-scale forest inventories. A simulation study is carried out in order to check the performance of the considered estimators under various situations involving the spatial distribution of the urban forests over the study area. An application is worked out on the data from the Italian NFI.

A different way to stay in touch with 'Urban Nature': The perceived restorative qualities of botanical gardens

Botanical gardens represent interesting arenas for research in environmental psychology and environment-behavior relations. They can be considered a very particular type of restorative environment and also have a relevant social function for the promotion of a more sustainable lifestyle in current societies. In this paper, we present a study assessing the relationship between the perceived restorativeness, the psychological and physical benefits experienced, and the subjective well-being reported by visitors of botanical gardens in four different cities in Italy (N = 127). As expected, a bootstrapping mediation model supported the idea that perceived restorativeness of botanical gardens significantly predicts visitors’ subjective well-being, both directly and indirectly through perceived physical and psychological benefits of the visit. A moderation model also revealed that the relationship between restorativeness and well-being varies across respondents with different socio-demographic characteristics, being stronger for singles as compared to couples with and without children, respectively. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Italian stone pine forests under Rome’s siege: learning from the past to protect their future

Abstract Italian stone pine is a landmark of Mediterranean coastal areas. Today, pinewoods represent environmental amenity areas at risk, being under siege from intensive urbanisation. We present an emblematic case study in Rome’s coastal strip where urban encroachment around pinewoods is somewhat overlooked by urban planning, which may be threatening for their conservation. We studied: (i) changes in land use intensification in the pinewoods’ surroundings over the past 60 years (1949–2008), by means of a synthetic index of landscape conservation (ILC) ranging from 0 (maximum level of anthropogenic landscape alteration) to 1 (maximum level of landscape naturalness); (ii) influence of different landscape protection level on land use intensification. Findings show that in areas with low levels of landscape protection, the ILC had been decreasing in the first 100-m surrounding pinewoods, and within the 1-km buffer. The ILC had been rather stable within areas with high levels of landscape protection. Lessons learnt have implications for spatial development strategies to protect coastal pinewoods from external pressures due to future (planned) urban densification in their surroundings.