Forest in Sicily

Abstract

The Sicilian forestal landscape is part of an agro-forestal environment where wood stations, often spatially organized on grazing, alternate to scrublands and cultivated areas. In Roman times, the island’s forest surface amounted to about one million hectares, but the deforestation practices carried out to give room to agriculture, along the centuries, reduced this surface to about a third. Forests are still well preserved on mountains and above all on the Sicani, Madonie, and Nebrodi ranges and on Mt. Etna. On the remaining territory, the forest landscape is quite irregular and characterized by small stations within agricultural and grazing territories. On the basis of the last Regional Forests Inventory, today the total forestal surface amounts to 512 thousand hectares, but only 274 thousand are real woods; the remaining surface is made of maquis, shrublands, and grounds evolving into woods. The presence of so many areas evolving into woods is due to the fact that, on these areas, cultivation, and above all grazing, have been abandoned. Sicilian forests have been classified into 14 forest categories (9 of broadleaf trees, 3 of conifers, 2 of maquis and shrublands), subdivided into 58 forest Types; these forest categories have been defined on a physiognomic basis according to the prevailing species and then subdivided into types according to the vegetation dynamics.