GESTIONE DEL BOSCO E CONSERVAZIONE DELLA BIODIVERSITA': L'ANALISI ECOPAESISTICA APPLICATA A TERRITORI BOSCATI DELLA TOSCANA MERIDIONALE. Premessa

This research, developed for a wooded area of Southern Toscana with both the evergreen and deciduous broadleaves woods, aims to show the consequences of coppice management on biodiversity and to suggest a methodology useful to foster biological conservation. An analysis of landscape spatial confi guration was carried out according to principles of landscape ecology and using birds as indicators, by means of already available data describing this territory. The connection between the territory and biodiversity has been analysed at different spatial scales to understand if the perception limits of wooded land and their changes, caused by implementation of forestry strategies by a forest technician can be analogous to that of birds. Scenarios were built according to different constrains applied to management to estimate the impact of different utilisation criteria on resources spatial pattern and therefore on biodiversity. These criteria were then tested in a public estate managed according to a forest management plan. The most relevant conclusions of this research can be summarised as follows: 1. at a regional level the Colline Metallifere territory is important for establishing ecological continuity. Forestry and ecological planning should always approach the territory at different scales; 2. structural heterogeneity, for this case study, affects biodiversity in an apparently contradictory way. The management criteria adopted favour bird species linked to high forest environment but are disadvantageous to species linked to open ground. Forest policy of past decades leading to reforestation of former fi elds and pastures, rural depopulation inducing the secondary succession on abandonedfarmland and longer coppice rotations resulted in a strong reduction of open areas. These are important habitats for birds, which all over the Mediterranean area are menaced; 3. growth processes cause structural changes at the stand level and therefore mosaics originated by different stand structures can be considered as “fragile”. Changes in the landscape due to these processes increase homogeneity and therefore may act on biodiversity in a negative way; 4. several limitations adopted in building the scenarios correspond to rules already adopted in standard management plans, which do not take biodiversity specifi cally into consideration; 5. empirical data on biodiversity collected in coppices, which could support or reject these hypotheses, are lacking; fi eld research is mostly needed; 6. different behaviour of various bird species in the coppice habitat show the need to adopt strict and clear concepts regarding indicator species or umbrella species and to avoid generic statements about “fauna”, “birds” or “habitat” to evaluate biodiversity