LIFE SPAN

Traditional forest management, still all too often focused solely on maximising wood production, has led in many areas to a reduction in structural heterogeneity, in the presence of standing and ground dead wood and in the availability of microhabitats, with a consequent reduction in species diversity. This is even more true for saproxylic biodiversity, i.e. that represented by species linked at least at one stage of their life cycle to decaying or dead wood or other saproxylic organisms. This category, often overlooked, accounts for as much as 30 percent of forest biodiversity.

The main objective of the LIFE SPAN project – Saproxilic Habitat Network: planning and management for European Forests – is to develop and test management solutions that, by integrating with the models already implemented in protected areas and productive forests, guarantee the protection of forest biodiversity, with particular attention to saproxilic biodiversity. Through an innovative forest planning and management approach, always attentive to the economic sustainability of the proposed interventions, management proposals aimed at the conservation of habitats and species of community interest linked to deadwood will be implemented and monitored.

The tool at the basis of this pathway is the Saproxylic Habitat Network (SHN) a network of ‘senescence areas (SHS)’ that will promote the movement and dispersal of different saproxylic species through the surrounding areas, in practice the SHS will act as nodes in a network that will allow the movement and recolonisation of territories abandoned in the past due to forest management methods. SHS are a tool for multifunctional sustainable forestry, combining ecological, economic and social issues in the same area.