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The maintenance of certain levels of old forest represents a cornerstone of the EU's biodiversity management strategy. A consensus on a single general ecological definition of old-growth is particularly difficult in Mediterranean Europe. The present paper deals with old-growth forests and persistent woodlands in the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park (PNCVD) to give an ecological understanding of forest complexity and dynamics under a multiscale and multidisciplinary perspective. The multiscale approach ranged from the identification and mapping of potential old-growth stands at landscape scale to a two-level field review of forest stand features. Field sampling involved a multidisciplinary team of researchers in forest structure, pedologic environment, soil microbial activity, flora and vegetation and deadwood components. The research provided sound knowledge about old-growthness features in the PNCVD that constitutes a unique case study in the whole Mediterranean basin. The integration of results allowed to: identify main ecosystem functions and the related services of the old-growth forests in the study area; distinguish persistent woodlands, multi-aged stands with old trees deriving from nineteenth-century management practices, from old-growth forests sensu strictu; recognize indicators of direct and indirect impacts of human activities; suggest effective practices for sustainable management in the Mediterranean context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadleaved forest is one of the most severely exploited and threatened ecosystems worldwide such that many authors have highlighted the scarcity of undisturbed old-growth broadleaved forests, especially in southern Europe. From an ecological perspective, old-growth forests are considered to be significant for their structural diversity and complex ecological relationships among species. In this paper, we compare ground measurements of leaf area index (LAI) and the remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) autocorrelation pattern of two old-growth forest stands in the Cilento National Park (southern Italy) with two nearby managed forests stands of the same type. Results show that old-growth forests have higher fine-scale variability in both LAI and NDVI values and longer autocorrelation ranges than the corresponding managed forests. The potential relevance of these findings for the single large or several small (SLOSS) debate is also briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]