The modernity of forests
"The forests they offer a fundamental ecosystem service for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions: together with the oceans, they reduce more than 50% of industrial emissions. However – Vescovo underlines – they too can suffer strong stress due to climate change (first and foremost, drought), and it is not at all easy to monitor their state of health”. “We live in a paradox: on the one hand, we have numerous satellites that, with extraordinary quality resolutions, give us continuous information on forests around the world, on the other, there is a lack of ground measurements”, adds the FEM researcher, launching the international project Remo Trees. “This project, launched in some remote areas of the Earth, allows us to measure fundamental variables of the forests such as the growth status of the canopy, H2O flow, air temperatures and relative humidity”.
Systematic monitoring
From monitoring the green lungs of the planet to that of the animals that populate it. Marco Salvatori studies the dynamics of interaction between humans and wild fauna through systematic monitoring with camera traps. “Through these technological eyes we are able to capture fragments of the private lives of wild mammals, but also of human frequentation of the territory, which is definitely growing: in the Brenta Dolomites area we have seen that animals tend to become more nocturnal (a global trend), with large animals more likely to move to remote and inaccessible areas”.
What does the future predict
“Increasingly sensitive and cutting-edge technologies – he adds – are revolutionizing the field of conservation biology. There is great attention on artificial intelligence linked to bioacoustics, which is being trained in an increasingly refined way to have systems for recognizing species through sounds. The future is to have increasingly integrated technologies, capable of simultaneously capturing images, sounds and other information and detecting different components of animal communities”. “In the forestry field – concludes Vescovo – it would be very useful to develop new systems to estimate plant stress: plants are sources of light and by monitoring their fluorescence, for example, we could understand how they are: it would be like measuring their heart rate” (source: Province of Trento).