Application of indicators network analysis to support local forest management plan development: a case study in Molise, Italy

Abstract

Forest management plans and Criteria and Indicators are the most important tools to support sustainable forest management. Due to the important role of forests in contributing to humans’ well being through the numerous ecosystem services they provide, in the last two decades many efforts have been made to develop new forest management tools at different scale levels. Territorial Forest Plan and Criteria and Indicators for SFM are considered as the innovative tools to support forest management. A participatory approach, providing a better knowledge of social framework conditions and trends on local markets, is considered the focus of new forest management tools. Territorial Forest Plan allows to identify the main function of forest stands at territorial level, based on both forest type and stakeholders’ opinions. On the other hand, the Indicators Network can be helpful to support forest management because it allows to identify the main causal paths and crucial linkages involving the indicators and to offer decision makers the opportunity to manage the forest ecosystem in a more holistic way. In this work, an application of indicators network analysis to support Territorial Forest Plan development in the Nature 2000 site has been studied. Based on the results obtained, an integrated use of both approaches may provide an added value to sustainable forest management

Mapping forest ecosystem functions for landscape planning in a mountain Natura2000 site, Central Italy

“…driving the stakeholders to structure the SFM Indicators Networks (Santopuoli, Requardt, and Marchetti 2012). For example, linking the FDU map with a forest management plan can orient the forest management planners toward alternative schemes of forest interventions, in agreement with the current condition of the forests and with regard to the main ecosystem functions that the forests can actually provide.…”

Pan-European sustainable forest management indicators for assessing Climate-Smart Forestry in Europe

“…Differences in social-economic and environmental conditions, challenges in data collection and the analysis of climate change impacts in general are mentioned by many authors as causes of these uncertainties (Seidl and Lexer 2013;Forsius et al 2016;Viccaro et al 2019). The versatility of the SFM indicators allows to use them for multiple aspects of forest management, as for example to assess stakeholders' perceptions (Santopuoli et al 2012;Paletto et al 2014;Pastorella et al 2016), facilitating the balancing of alternative management options in specific environmental and socio-economic contexts. Recently, a study of Bowditch For personal use only.…”

Decision Support Tools and Strategies to Simulate Forest Landscape Evolutions Integrating Forest Owner Behaviour: A Review from the Case Studies of the European Project, INTEGRAL

“…For example, the inclusion of criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management as available at EU scale may improve the evaluation of the implications of decision support tools on forest functionality towards a standardized way. Some proposals come from Santopuoli et al [55] for social and cultural sustainability, and by Pereira et al [56] for biodiversity conservation. However, the different representation of the forest landscape in the different DSS makes adoption of landscape level post-calculation indicators applied in other regions or DSS difficult.…”