Le buone pratiche selvicolturali del progetto Life ResilForMed

Abstract

The resilience is an ecosystem capacity to adapt itself and recover its characteristics in consequence of a natural or man-induced change, but an endangered ecosystem recovery can be either rapid or very slow. The man-induced climate change is today well known, but it’s sudden and ecosystems cannot not efficaciously cope with it. In this context, forests have a double function towards climate change: - they contribute in mitigating the effects of this change; - their adaptation grants a sustainable development. In Sicily, forests and pre-forest ecosystems are characterized by simple and fragile structures, endangered by the deterioration resulting from the single or joined action of fires, grazing, non-functional cutting and attacks from parasites. The Project LIFE11 ENV/IT/000215 RESILFORMED (RESilience of MEDiterranean FORests to Climate Change) arises from these bases. The project has analysed the Sicilian forests to locate those forest areas which are more vulnerable to the desertification risk in order to apply the forest managing technics aiming at increasing their resilience. Ornithological and silvicultural resilience indicators have been identified. The project has developed reliable forest management models grouped into five Best Management Practices (BMP) considered important for the improvement or reinforcement of the Mediterranean forests resilience to GC. The approach considered effective has been organized through the development of the following actions: - cartographic identification on a regional and landscape scale, of the forest areas at higher risk of desertification, an intersecting of the Environmental Sensitivity Areas to desertification of Sicilian region with the Regional Forest maps at a scale of 1:25’000 has been used; - analysis, assessment and quantification of the effects of climate changes, focused on variations of soil use and coverings; - definition of the communities and eco-systems role in the adaptive strategies to climate changes, based on selected silvicultural resilience indicators; - development of the best management models to improve or consolidate the forests ecosystems resilience. The definition of these models has required a strict methodological approach to assess, in objective terms, the current and desirable conditions of very different forests formations. The executive tool used to analyse the forests situation is “The forests resilience assessment chart”. This chart makes it possible to assess the resilience silvicultural indicators concerning the forest formation in the current stand context, and the desirable best conditions, from the resilience to climate changes point of view, on the short, medium and long term. Consequently, to choose the Best Management Practice (BMP) to adopt in each case. The established BMP are the following: - BMP1. Actions favouring mixing of species and hydrogeological stability of forest practices in order to favor of species improving soil quality; - BMP2. Renaturalization of forest plantations. Interventions aimed to pander renaturalization processes with the aim of increasing the stability, and thus the efficiency ecological-structural ecosystem, to reintegrate native species in forests free of seed-bearing trees were also foreseen; - BMP3. Remedial measures and restoration of degraded forests: silvicultural actions on degraded woods due to fire, etc. aimed at recovering the forest ecosystems. - BMP4. Actions aimed at enhancing complex structural forests. Conversion of coppices into high forests within the protected areas, to create favorable conditions for sporadic tree species, through the tree-oriented silviculture techniques; - BMP5. Actions favoring connectivity in agro-forestry systems: forest interventions aimed at reducing the fragmentation of forest areas.