Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The results provided in this topic respond to the growing interest of the recent
years in the role of the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems and its relevance for
national policies on mitigation and adaptation to climate changes.
There is also a growing need on the part of institutions, agencies and pol-
icy stakeholders for new data and analysis in relation to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. In particular, the
data presented in this topic contribute to build a basis for a full carbon account-
ability of the land sector.
1.2 Methods for the assessments of the greenhouse
gases budget
Different methods have been applied and compared, such as regional measurements,
use of flux networks and data-driven models within specific sectoral approaches in
order to characterize the greenhouse gases budget of terrestrial ecosystems. The Eddy
Covariance technique has been applied to a range of Italian sites representative of the
main plant functional types (PFT) and of the main Italian macro-regions, to provide
data and measures of carbon dioxide, water and energy flow for the whole period of
the project. This has made Italy the country with the most dense network of produc-
tion and eddy covariance Europe. The CarboItaly sites also contributed to the activi-
ties in the global network FLUXNET (
www.luxdata.org
)
. Measures of the NEE and
its partitioning into the Gross Primary Production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration
have been performed with the Eddy Covariance technique in order to analyse the role
of the Carbon Uptake Period in the total Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) and define
the effect of temperature and precipitation, disturbances and management practices
on the interannual variability of NEE, aiming at a better understanding of the role and
response of ecosystems to climate change.
The role of the Italian managed forest ecosystems in national greenhouse gases
budget has been widely discussed and investigated in this topic. Integration of land
use and forest inventory approaches as well as modeling based approaches have been
applied for the assessment of the national forest Gross and net primary productivity
(GPP and NPP) and the carbon, water, and elemental cycles. In forest ecosystems fire-
wood and forest harvesting represent a net carbon loss but the use of wood, carbon-
neutral renewable resource, for generating energy has also a strong substitution effect
as it avoids the use of fossil fuels which are highly CO
2
emitting. The use of wood
for construction purposes, substituting traditional materials, tends to increase carbon
sequestration and to contribute to climate change mitigation. The great potential of
the increasing use of forest wood products for energy, building and furniture pur-
poses in contributing to the reduction of GHG emissions and to a more sustainable
development have also been investigated. Another important aspect in the terrestrial
carbon budget is represented by the emissions from forest fires. Several experimen-
tal and modelling studies have been conducted and presented in this topic to improve
knowledge of the atmospheric impact of vegetation fires. Biogenic Volatile Organic
Compounds (BVOCs) fluxes have been measured in forest CarboItaly sites and a GIS-
based model has been developed for predicting BVOCs emissions from the Italian
