Deadwood in Italian forests according to National Forest Inventory results

Deadwood plays a key role in the functioning and productivity of forest ecosystem and it is an important feature for assessing and monitoring biodiversity. The third Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE) has recognized the importance of this forest component at the European level. More recently the national forest inventories have tried to harmonize the procedures including the quantitative and qualitative measurements of deadwood. This paper reports on the methods and results of Italian National Inventory of Forests and Forest Carbon Sinks (INFC) and compares the deadwood data with the results of other main European inventories and some local studies. In Italy the volume of deadwood (logs, snags and stumps) is on average 8.8 m3 ha-1.