Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The climate is strongly influenced by elevation, with cool summers and mod-
erately cold winters. During the last decade, the average temperature was 6.21 °C
and the annual precipitation was 964.21 mm (Niu et al.
2011
).
2.2.22 San Rossore (IT-SRo)
The study site is an even aged Pinus pinaster forest located 9 km west of Pisa
(central Italy) and 800 m east of seashore inside the regional park of San Rossore-
Migliarino-Massaciuccoli, (43.72786° N; 10.28444° E, elevation 6 m.a.s.l.) The
park extends for 24,000 ha about 30 km between Livorno and Viareggio along the
Tyrrhenian coast with an estuarial morphology characterized by the presence of
alluvial deposits and sandy dunes between the rivers Serchio and Arno.
Pinus pin-
aster
Aiton was introduced in 1771 in a strip of ca 10 1 km behind the dunes
in order to protect the economically important
P. pinea
L. plantations more inland.
Before human intervention, the
P. pinaster
area was covered by Mediterranean scle-
rophyllous forests and scrubs, a formation of Ligurian-Thyrrenian meso-Mediterra-
nean holm oak forests (
Quercus ilex
L.) with
Fraxinus ornus
L.,
Ostrya carpinifolia
Scop.,
Viburnum tinus
L. The current
P. pinaster
forest established from seed after
a big fire in 1944 and was never thinned systematically. A survey of the experimen-
tal plot in 2000 showed a tree density of 587 trees per ha (84 %
P. pinaster
, 12 %
P. pinea
, 4 %
Q. ilex
in the understorey), a basal area of 40 m
2
ha
−
1
, an average
canopy height of 18.7 m, a LAI of 2.8 and a total aboveground and root biomass
of 9.7 and 1.9 kg C m
−
2
. Due to a very high ungulate density, there is no ground
vegetation and only few shrubs like
Phyllirea angustifolia
L.,
Myrtus communis
L.,
Erica arborea
L. The soil in the pinewood is a regosol with a 93 % sand texture
extending down to 4 m depth. The top 10 cm of soil is characterized by pH (H
2
O)
of 6.5 and C/N ratio of 25.2; rooting depth is limited by the water table varying
between 100 cm in winter and 200 cm in summer. The climate of San Rossore is
Mediterranean sub-humid, with an average annual rainfall of 876 mm and an annual
temperature of 15.6 °C. The wind regime is characterized by a land-sea breeze cir-
culation with air flows from the west during the day and from the east during the
night. A large scale dye back of
P. pinaster
took place in the 70s due to the com-
bined impact of marine aerosol and surfactants. Currently, the
P. pinaster
area is
under a large scale attack of the maritime pine bast scale (
Matsucoccus feytaudi
)
and is going to be transformed into a more natural land cover with dominant
Q.ilex
.
2.2.23 Tolfa (IT-Tol)
The Tolfa-Allumiere site (42.18967° N; 11.92155° E) is an evergreen broadleaf
managed forest extending for about 6 ha, primarily characterized as Mediterranean
Macchia and located in a small and isolated mountainous chain in Central Italy,
close to the Tyrrhenian Sea. The elevation is 422 m.a.s.l. and the climate is
