The natural environment has gone through a series of changes as people have created different types of rural land uses. These vary from intensively cultivated fields to natural tree and shrubs communities, and are generally referred to as “landscape”.

While forest and shrub vegetation is expanding in marginal and remote areas, natural forest vegetation along the coasts and planes and suburban spaces is increasingly jeopardized by land development for tourism and industry as well as by transportation infrastructures. The transformation of the complex mosaic of naturally vegetated and cultivated land patches is nowadays a major problem in many European regions. The sustainability of environmental variability and biological diversity is threatened.

Restoration of fragmented landscapes under environmental change should be based on the knowledge that the different segments and land-uses in a landscape are ecologically closely interlinked. Therefore, it would be important to integrate the management across the whole landscape rather than within only isolated landscape segments.

Forest research contributes to the important task of promoting sustainability and diversity by developing an array of tools. These range from landscape analysis and planning to providing the best plant material and cultivation systems for high quality and quantity ligno-cellulosic biomass production, to identifying the most appropriate socio-economic initiatives to make tree and forest management an economically and environmentally viable activity.

However, there is still a gap in the theory and practice. The scope of this seminar is sharing the knowledge on how to use trees and forests for conservation, ecological restoration, energy and raw material in a sustainable way and how to use forestry in managing environmental changes.

Objectives

The seminar aims to improve the knowledge in the following fields:

• Relationship between ecological functions (productivity, biogeochemical cycles, genetic biodiversity) at the landscape scale
• Landscape management tools for environmental amelioration and restoration, such as tree planting, agroforestry, etc.
• Valuation of various forest-related functions, with special emphasis on forest tourism

The scientific programme is divided into three topics: 

1. Forest biology for a multifunctional approach to landscape: trees for timber, biomass and environmental remediation. Biological and silvicultural approaches for increasing the quantity and quality of goods and environmental services provided by trees and forests in the landscape context.

2. Innovative tools for monitoring and planning the rural and forest landscape
Remote sensing, GIS and modelling as tools for inventorying, planning and decision-making support for conservation and development of the rural and forest landscapes.

3. Ecosystem services and tourism: how to pay for landscape sustainability. Socio-economic research for valuing forest and landscape externalities while making the forest and agro-forest management economically more viable. The session is arranged in collaboration with EFI Regional Office EFIMED.

Scientific Committee

Ted Farrell – EFI
Americo Carvalho-Mendes - UCP
Giuseppe Scarascia-Mugnozza – CNR-IBAF
Marco Marchetti – UNIVERSITY OF MOLISE
Marco Borghetti – UNIVERSITY OF BASILICATA
Lorenzo Venzi – UNIVERSITY OF TUSCIA
Marc Palahi – EFIMED
Yves Birot – EFIMED