Thomas Campagnaro

Using forest management to control invasive alien species: helping implement the new European regulation on invasive alien species

On 1 January 2015 a new European regulation on invasive alien species entered in force. Key aspects of this regulation are the adoption of a list of invasive alien species which are of European Union concern, the requirement for specific prevention measures, the establishment of early detection and fast eradication measures, and the management of the widely spread invasive alien species. We highlight the potential contribution of the forestry sector to promote the implementation of this regulation. There is a wealth of experience on positive and negative responses of invasive alien species to forestry interventions. This knowledge should be synthesized and further developed to help prevent and manage invasions in forests and adjacent habitats and to minimize the risks of invasive alien species. We thus recommend that decisions regarding the application of the regulation will include actors responsible for, or involved in, the management and use of forests and related semi-natural habitats.

Ecological risk and accessibility analysis to assess the impact of roads under Habitats Directive

We propose a method for the appropriate assessment of adverse effects of roads in compliance with the European Union Habitats Directive. The method incorporates an analysis of ecological risk of edge effects by the proposed roads with the related increase in accessibility. The method was tested on 30 km of planned forest roads inside an 8,000-ha reserve included in two Natura 2000 sites. As a result, the cumulative effect of 19 road segments was judged as not significantly affecting the integrity of the sites, although they made accessible an extra 314 ha. On the basis of the accessibility calculation, 20 ha of land were set aside from forest exploitation as a mandatory mitigation measure. The method objectively determined the cumulative adverse effects, enabled comparison of plan revisions and alternatives and proved to measure direct and indirect significant effects with a realistic effort in terms of field survey and geographic information system processing.

Abandonment of timber harvesting favours European beech over silver fir: evidence from Val Tovanella Nature Reserve in the southern Dolomites (Northern Italy)

Historical data from forest management plans have the potential to shed light on changes driven by either the application or the abandonment of forestry practices. This information coupled with recent data allows temporal comparisons to be made between surveys at the same location. Here we present the temporal comparison of two forest compartments located in Val Tovanella (Oriented Nature Reserve [Riserva Naturale Orientata] and Site of Community Importance) in the south-eastern Italian Alps for which full callipering was available for two years (1957 and 2010), the first of which came from a management plan by the renowned forest ecologist Lucio Susmel (1914–2006). Both compartments currently host mixed silver fir, Norway spruce and beech stands, and have not been managed since 1948; but one was historically a high forest, whereas the other was an open wooded pasture. We aimed to reconstruct the changes in volume, number of stems and diameter classes for the two compartments by comparing species proportions and their changes over time. In both compartments, species composition changed. In general, a decrease in compositional importance of silver fir and an increase in beech were observed. Furthermore, in one compartment, Norway spruce showed a large increase. Volumetric changes confirmed such trends and highlighted a shift towards larger diameter classes. We conclude that the abandonment of traditional forest activities and, in particular, the avoidance of tending and coppicing activities are major factors favouring beech at the expense of silver fir in the study area. Traditional planning and inventory methods can help to understand long-term changes in forest structure and the effects of forestry in light of current scenarios of land-use and climate change in protected areas. Profile