Disturbances To The Forest Soil of Ground-Based Logging and Related Recovery Time: Insights From Central European and Mediterranean Beech Forests

Understanding and mitigating the environmental concerns related to ground-based logging is one of the key aspects of sustainable forest management and a fundamental issue for achieving the goals of the newest European strategies in terms of forests, soil and biodiversity. On the other hand, studies dealing with a holistic assessment of the disturbances that ground-based logging can imply to the soils of beech forests are missing. Furthermore, there is a clear knowledge gap concerning the recovery time that forest soils need to return to the pre-harvesting conditions. The assessment of environmental impacts, with a particular reference to soil disturbance, related to ground-based timber extraction in Mediterranean and Central European beech forests is properly the main goal of the project AIMSUSFOR, which I am currently managing in the framework of my Marie Curie Grant at the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In the framework of the project five studies areas were identified in Italy and Poland in order to compare the soil disturbances to soil physicochemical and biological features, as well as litter decomposition rate, related to ground-based timber extraction in shelterwood interventions in beech forests. This presentation reports the overall results of the project which is going to finish on 30/06/2024. We found that in the framework of Mediterranean forestry, characterised by a medium-mechanisation level, soil physicochemical features and microarthropods biodiversity are strongly impacted by ground-based logging, but a 10-year period is enough to let the forest soil recover. Data concerning Polish study areas and litter decmposition rates in both Poland and Italy are still under analysis, and will be presented for the first time in the conference.