Round Table – New theories in silviculture
IV National Congress of Silviculture - Wednesday, November 7th, 2018, Turin, Italy.
In the last decades there has been a growing attention towards new approaches in silviculture and forest management. The science of complexity has been recently acnowledged in forestry as a means to better understand the functioning of forest ecosystems and their relations with the social and economic systems. Managing forests as complex adaptive systems introduces a new approach to investigating and interpreting the impacts of human action on forests, which is completely different from the conventional view which has been the foundation of forestry science until the end of the last century. This entails a novel approach both from a research and an educational point of view. Examples of forest research projects carried out in the framework of the CAS thoery are still very few, most often there is the attempt to give a new interpretation of existing experimental networks and data. Teaching forestry based on CAS theory not only changes the notions that are imparted to students but, above all, it shifts to interactive and transdisciplinary ways of treating forestry problems.
The Round Table discussed the implications of these new approaches, confronting different views and experiences.
