In the last years a new conception of forest environment and management, called Systemic Silviculture (Ciancio, 1999), based on the assumption that forest is a complex, not linear and not predictable biological organism has risen. This is not the place where talk about the fundamentals principles of this theory but, according to it, i would like to highlight the mutate management approach: from forecasting to monitoring (Corona e Scotti, 2011).
In the last century many efforts of forest researchers have been adressed toward predict the behavior of managed or not managed forest stands, mainly about dynamics, growth and yield aspects. The role and importance of the modelling approach in forestry is left to other authors and treaty, more prepared than the writer.
Here, i want just underline the important role that monitoring, and tools to implement it, are aquiring in forestry, either to assess or manage in a sustainable way forest and environmental resources.
The fundamentals on which an efficient survey plan have to be based are:
Objectivity
Repetitivity
Reliability.
The switch, as above mentioned, from forecasting to monitoring and from the “command and control” to an adaptative approach in forestry, has allowed at a new branch of technology to increase is role about the forest resources management and planning: Remote Sensing (RS).
I strongly believe that the laboratory of the forester is the forest, so he cannot miss his appointment with the field analysis, description and measurements, in order to understand, as better as he can, what the forest “is trying to say”. Unfortunately these ones are the most expensive aspects of forest management planning, and above all, they are extremely hard to apply, in homogeneous and coherent way, on wide surfaces because, althought the use of specific guidelines, they can go against 2 of the 3 principles before mentioned, objectivity and repetitivity, while the reliability depends instead of operator's experience and professional skills.
The integrate use of remote sensing techniques, and sample methodologies for locate field observations, can solve many of these issues.
Remote sensing techniques return data which can be, after appropriate processing, related to forest parameters directly - such as photointerpetation (PI) of orthophotos (OP) - or indirectly – e.g. Image Processing (IP) of Multispectral Satellite Imagey (MSI) or LiDAR Data (LD) processing.
An important step of the planning process is the subdivision of the forest in a physiographic units and, inside each of these units, in a homogeneous physiognomic subunits.
PI of OP, IP of MSI and LD processing can support foresters in the subdivision process, furthermore MSI and LD are able to return, after processing, the functional (MSI) and structural (LD) state of the ecosystem in a objectivity, repetitivity and truthfulness way, so they can be used as a efficients tools for monitoring and manage forests, because they allow the periodically assess of the results of our silvicultural intervents and give information on how correct them (adaptative management).
The data resulted from IP and LD processing have to be validate which field measurement and observation, located by a sample design which aims to reduce the cost of this step, in order to increase their precision and truthfulness.
In last analysis i think that an important branch of forest research have to be addressed to the combined use of remotely sensed data and field measurements (both new or pre-esistent, e.g. forest inventory data) because they offer, to the people involved in the forestry field - forest owner/manager or forest researcher - the tools to practice a sustainable forest resources management, and a vision of how the forest dynamics develops as a consequences of his actions.
