From managed to old-growth forests: dendroecology and sustainable forest management

Since the beginning of the 19th century foresters and forest managers have used tree rings to determine the tree growth rates and to support sustained forest management. The increment borer, that it is still widely used today and it is by far the basic tool in most of tree-ring investigations, was developed for this purpose in Germany by Max Robert Pressler in the mid 1800s . In the last decades tree-ring science has been used by foresters for several other purposes mainly related to the development of a sustainable naturalistic silviculture . In order to achieve this target it is necessary to analyse the past development of managed and unmanaged forests and to study their dynamics, disturbance regime and ecological processes at different scales . The aim of this presentation is to briefly outline the major steps in recent tree-rings related silvicultural researches and to discuss problems , challenges and the potential further developments.