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Forest planning, forest management, and forest policy require updated, reliable, and harmonized spatial datasets. In Italy a national geographic Forest Information System (FIS) designed to store and facilitate the access and analysis of spatial datasets is still missing. Among the different information layers which are useful to start populating a FIS, two are essential for their multiple use in the assessment of forest resources: (i) forest mapping, and (ii) data from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS). Both layers are not available wall-to-wall for Italy, though different local sources of information potentially useful for their implementation already exist. The objectives of this work were to: (i) review forest maps and ALS data availability in Italy; (ii) develop for the first time a high resolution forest mask of Italy which was validated against the official statistics of the Italian National Forest Inventory; (iii) develop the first mosaic of all the main ALS data available in Italy producing a consistent Canopy Height Model (CHM). An on-line geographic FIS with free access to both layers from (ii) and (iii) was developed for demonstration purposes. The total area of forest and other wooded lands computed from the forest mask was 102.608.82 km2 (34% of the Italian territory), i.e., 1.9% less than the NFI benchmark estimate. This map is currently the best wall-to-wall forest mask available for Italy. We showed that only the 63% of the Italian territory (the 60% of the forest area) is covered by ALS data. These results highlight the urgent need for a national strategy to complete the availability of forest data in Italy.

In seguito alla forte siccità dell’estate 2017 è sorta la necessità di avere un quadro il quanto più possibile esaustivo e approfondito della riserva acqua in Toscana. In questo contesto si inserisce l’aggiornamento del catasto degli invasi, che, oltre alla realizzazione di un inventario unico (ad oggi disperso in più archivi con informazioni e date di aggiornamento diverse) fornisca una stima di massima della capacità di invaso in relazione alle necessità idriche stagionali del territorio. Quest’ultimo punto è realizzato grazie ad una serie di sopralluoghi su un subset degli invasi regionali che permettono di mettere in relazione la tipologia e la superficie con il volume. Il progetto si avvale di quattro assegnisti di ricerca, contrattati per il progetto, sotto la supervisione di due ricercatori più il responsabile del settore geomatica del LaMMA.