Forest management and planning

The aim of the course is to provide students with the elements for knowing, 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.
The course is organised as an interdisciplinary laboratory, in which professors from different disciplines (forestry, hydrology, pedology, and economics) guide the students in carrying out a project based on a real case study, by integrating lectures, field work, and data analysis.
This laboratory gives students the possibility, while learning specific concepts and skills related to forestry, to acquire transversal skills, such as work in a group, discuss results, communicate concepts, and critically evaluate and use literature sources.

At the end of the course the students should:
· know forest degradation dynamics, the main disturbing agents and their effects;
· be able to analyse 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 related 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.
Students will also be able to:
· independently evaluate methods to monitor and analyse forest risks, and to evaluate
the mitigation interventions needed;
· clearly summarise and communicate, in writing and orally, information and ideas
related to forest risks and their mitigation;
· independently find and evaluate literature sources and databases about forest risks and
their mitigation, to update their knowledge.