Mountain Lab

The aim of the course is to equip students with the elements for understanding, predicting and quantifying natural hazards in mountain environments (such as forest fires, rockfall and avalanches, shallow landslides and debris flows); for designing risk mitigation activities, in particular by strengthening the protective role of forests; and for carrying out a cost-benefit assessment of risk reduction activities

At the end of the course the student should:
- be able to analyze the ecological processes in the main types of mountain forests.
- be able to interpret forest planning documents.
- know how to measure and quantify the effectiveness of the protective function of forests against rockfall and avalanches.
- be able to assess the danger related to forest fires.
- know how to formulate management decisions to increase the resistance and resilience of forests to natural hazards.
- know how to locate intervention priorities.
- know how to interpret and draw up the main lines of a plan for safeguarding the territory from hydrogeological risk and forest fires.
- be able to analyse the main natural hazards in mountain areas, and to draw up the relative risk maps.
- know how to apply the main methods to assess the characteristics of soils and snow in mountain areas.
- know how to apply the tools for preventing and mitigating the risk deriving from erosion and movements of the snowpack, both slow (snow gliding) and fast (avalanches).
- know how to apply the main methods of assessing externalities (contingent assessment, choice modeling).
- know how to set up a cost / benefit analysis extended to environmental components.