Global change and silvicultural research

http://dx.doi.org/10.12899/asr-1827 1 CREA Research Centre for Forestry and Wood 1. The rapidity of the global change and the complexity of the phenomena involved make any forecast of future environmental conditions rather uncertain: the only thing we can be sure of is that the future will be different from the present and that most ecosystems will be living in conditions never experienced before. The awareness of an uncertain but certainly different future motivates the search for innovative solutions for a sustainable management of forest systems. Distinctively, accepting that the future will be different from both the past and the present makes it necessary to develop flexible management strategies to promote the proper adaptation. Therefore, it is expedient to fully recover the experimental character of silviculture. From a scientific point of view, one of the most important premises under this perspective has been to consider the forest as a complex biological system (Ciancio 1996). From this approach, some guiding principles for forest management in times of global change have been derived worldwide (references in: Messier et al. 2013, Nocentini et al. 2017), among which: promoting the structural and compositional diversity of forest stands by adapting silvicultural treatment to the variety of structural and microsite conditions of the forest; exploiting the self-organizing potential of forest stands to increase their resistance and resilience; adopting flexible planning approaches; involving the stakeholders in decision-making processes, on the various operational scales.