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This paper briefly describes the recent initiatives of Spain and France that made raw data from their National Forestry Inventory available both online and via open-access databases. As part of the implementation of the European PSI-Directive on the re-use of Public Administration data and the realization of the Statute of Digital Administration by the Agency for Digital Italy (AGID), a similar implementation by the Italian Forest Service is expected through the on-line and open access publication of all georeferenced data related to the phase III of the 2015 Italian Inventory of Forests and Carbon Reservoirs.

The spread of geobrowsers as tools for displaying geographically referenced information provides insights and opportunities to those who, not being specialists in Geographic Information Systems, want to take advantage from exploration and communication power offered by these software. Through the use of web services such as Google Maps and the use of suitable markup languages, one can create interactive maps starting from highly heterogeneous data and information. These interactive maps can also be easily distributed and shared with Internet users, because they do not need to use proprietary software nor special skills but only a web browser. Unlike the maps created with GIS, whose output usually is a static image, the interactive maps retain all their features to users advantage. This paper describes a web application that, using the Keyhole Markup Language and the free service of Google Maps, produces choropleth maps relating to some forest indicators estimated by the last Italian National Forest Inventory. The creation of a map is done through a simple and intuitive interface. The maps created by users can be downloaded as KML file and can be viewed or modified via the freeware application Google Earth or free and open source GIS software like Quantum GIS. The web application is free and available at www.ricercaforestale.it.

The future agreements on the LULUCF sector will probably implement the role of harvest wood products (HWP) for climate change mitigation. As highlighted by many Authors however, for Italy to quantify the amount of HWP will impose a number of issues mainly related to the inconsistency of the data provided by the National Institute for Statistic (ISTAT). New data collected by the National Forest and Carbon Inventory (INFC) will probably provide useful information. In the meantime, however, a comparison based on the forest area reported by INFC and data on HWP provided by ISTAT, both scaled at province level, could be proposed. The 2005 was assumed as reference year for both data sources. At this purpose, grouping the 103 Italian provinces in 9 groups mainly based on the 20 administrative regions, the Pearson coefficient of correlation was estimated, for each group, comparing the amount of harvest reported by ISTAT with (i) the forest area, (ii) the plantation area and (iii) the total forest area, including both plantations and forests. Possible outliers were identified estimating the harvest rates per hectare of forest and considering the interquantile range of these values. A linear model was finally applied between the total forest area and the total amount of harvest estimated at regional level. The results highlighted a strong correlation between the amount of harvest reported by ISTAT and the forest area reported by INFC for 13 out of 21 regions. For 5 regions, including Lombardia, Piemonte, Lazio, Umbria and Marche the amount of harvest was only correlated with the area of plantations. No correlation was detected for Toscana region. Based on the harvest rate per hectare, 5 provinces out of 103 were identified as outliers. The amount of harvest reported for 3 of these provinces (Cremona, Mantova and Pavia) was clearly referred to plantations. The analysis of the studentized residuals based on the application of the linear model, highlighted outliers values also for Piemonte region. As in the previous case, the amount of harvest reported for this region was probably partially referred to plantations. We could therefore speculate that for many regions data reported by national statistics as referred to the amount of harvest in forest, were statistically correlated with the forest area detected by INFC. However, for some important regions, such as Piemonte and Lombardia, they were clearly correlated with plantations.

Raw data from the Italian National Forest Inventory are on-line and publicly available. The National Forest Service in cooperation with the Forest Monitoring and Management Research Unit of the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA) released the raw data from the National Inventory of Forests and forest Carbon pools - INFC2005 project, the second Italian national forest inventory. Data are available together with metadata information at http://www.inventarioforestale.org/. Users, after registration, can download data from 230.874 living tree stems, 16.472 dead tree stems, 31.083 stumps, from a total of 7.272 field plots (for 1.384 of them additional data on fine woody debris and soil carbon pools are also available).

The increasing popularity of geobrowsers as tools for displaying geographically referenced information provides insights and opportunities for those who, not being specialists in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), want to take advantage from the exploration and the communication power offered by these software. Through the use of web services such as Google Maps® and the use of suitable markup languages, interactive maps starting from highly heterogeneous data and information may be created. These maps may also be easily distributed and shared with Internet users, because they do not need to use proprietary software nor special skills, but only a web browser. Unlike the maps created with GIS, whose output usually is a static image, the interactive maps retain all their features to users advantage. This paper describes a web application that, using the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and the free service of Google Maps®, produces choropleth maps relating to some forest indicators estimated by the last Italian National Forest Inventory. The creation of a map is done through a simple and intuitive interface. The maps created by users can be downloaded as KML file and can be viewed or modified via the freeware application Google Earth® or free and open source GIS software like Quantum GIS. The web application is free and available at http://www.ricercaforestale.it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Province-scale comparison between harvest wood products reported by ISTAT and forested areas reported by INFC. The future agreements on the LULUCF sector will probably implement the role of harvest wood products (HWP) for climate change mitigation. As highlighted by many Authors however, for Italy to quantify the amount of HWP will impose a number of issues mainly related to the inconsistency of the data provided by the National Institute for Statistic (ISTAT). New data collected by the National Forest and Carbon Inventory (INFC) will probably provide useful information. In the meantime, however, a comparison based on the forest area reported by INFC and data on HWP provided by ISTAT, both scaled at province level, could be proposed. The 2005 was assumed as reference year for both data sources. At this purpose, grouping the 103 Italian provinces in 9 groups mainly based on the 20 administrative regions, the Pearson coefficient of correlation was estimated, for each group, comparing the amount of harvest reported by ISTAT with (i) the forest area, (ii) the plantation area and (iii) the total forest area, including both plantations and forests. Possible outliers were identified estimating the harvest rates per hectare of forest and considering the interquantile range of these values. A linear model was finally applied between the total forest area and the total amount of harvest estimated at regional level. The results highlighted a strong correlation between the amount of harvest reported by ISTAT and the forest area reported by INFC for 13 out of 21 regions. For 5 regions, including Lombardia, Piemonte, Lazio, Umbria and Marche the amount of harvest was only correlated with the area of plantations. No correlation was detected for Toscana region. Based on the harvest rate per hectare, 5 provinces out of 103 were identified as outliers. The amount of harvest reported for 3 of these provinces (Cremona, Mantova and Pavia) was clearly referred to plantations. The analysis of the studentized residuals based on the application of the linear model, highlighted outliers values also for Piemonte region. As in the previous case, the amount of harvest reported for this region was probably partially referred to plantations. We could therefore speculate that for many regions data reported by national statistics as referred to the amount of harvest in forest, were statistically correlated with the forest area detected by INFC. However, for some important regions, such as Piemonte and Lombardia, they were clearly correlated with plantations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]