Assessing forest accessibility for the multifunctional management of protected areas in Central Italy

Multifunctional forest management should provide the opportunity to create, conserve, modify or eliminate forest roads. Within protected areas, it is difficult to make a single assessment of the degree of accessibility to different forest areas, having to mediate among productive forestry, protection needs and other benefits deriving from forest stands. A GIS-based methodology, with the support of a Forest Information System (FIS) and available Forest Plans for the study area, were applied to create an accessibility map (based on the forest roads network) for the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park (PNALM). Results were related to several FIS metadata, highlighting that accessibility in the study area was sufficient, but not optimal, in the productive management units, being rather poor in those where soil protection and biodiversity conservation are the main functions (only 38.8% of them were accessible). Forest roads density (28.5 m ha(-1)) was not homogeneously distributed within the study area and the ratio between forest road length (199.4 km) and planned forest surface (13,355.3 ha) is only 14.9 m ha(-1). In contrast to what is commonly found in forest accessibility works, the innovative element of this study was the involvement of PNALM's technical office in evaluating the results and exploring the opportunity to adopt a different policy for forest roads network management.

Automated summary

Multifunctional forest management requires balancing productive forestry, protection needs, and other benefits. This study used GIS and FIS to create an accessibility map for Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park. The results showed that accessibility was sufficient but not optimal in productive management units and poor in areas focused on soil protection and biodiversity conservation. Forest road density was unevenly distributed, and there is potential for adopting a different policy for forest road network management.