A district-level approach to climate and land use change adaptation strategies in forest landscape management

Jointly with stakeholders we developed a district forest plan in a 41,013 ha Northern Italy valley of the Dolomites (46°31' N, 12°09' E) as a pilot for developing and integrating measures of adaptation to climate and land-use change in operational forest planning. The main elements of the plan were: i) use and further development of the territorial, environmental, and forest regional geodatabase; ii) zoning of forest areas through multi-criteria analysis according to an hierarchy of ecosystem service and landscape-level forest types; iii) involvement of key stakeholders through several participatory events; iv) respect the prerogatives given at the local forest planning level. The results showed that the effects of climate change have interacted with the effects of past forest landscape management (e.g., distribution and frequency of silvicultural interventions) and the changes in land use. For example, beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) has shown a remarkable increase in both volume and cover. Therefore, suggested adaptation measures take into account these masking factors on changes driven by climate variations, as well as the uncertainty of the broad-scale climate change scenarios and the effects on the regulation and protective capacity of forests