Vol. 66 No. 3 (2011):
Special section

Systemic silviculture, adaptive management and forest monitoring perspectives

Piermaria Corona
Dipartimento per la Innovazione nei Sistemi Biologici, Agroalimentari e Forestali, Università della Tuscia, via San Camillo de Lellis, 01100 Viterbo (Italy).
Roberto Scotti
Nuoro Forestry School, Università di Sassari, Via C. Colombo 1, 08100 Nuoro (Italy).

Published 2011-06-30

Keywords

  • sustainable forest management,
  • complex systems,
  • decision making,
  • heuristic approach,
  • uncertainty,
  • causality
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Abstract

Systemic silviculture can be framed as an approach in which management practices are conceived as learning experiments. In the light of this, effective and efficient monitoring processes are required in order to inform and support the management taking explicitly into account the many system components, their interactions and its nonlinear behavior, a characteristic that determines important limitations with regard to the value of predictions. In order to evaluate evidence and turn data into decisions, monitoring effectiveness and efficiency encompass adequate statistical methods and tools for acquisition, processing and analysis of information from different sources. The present note highlights some key contributions on which to engage the development of forest monitoring under such a perspective.