The Use of the Forest Status Quality Indicator in Planning Policies for Biodiversity Conservation Ten Case Studies on Forest Plantations in North Italy Silvia Assini Dept. of Earth and Environment Sciences University of Pavia Pavia, Italy Email: silviapaola.assini@unipv.it Maria Grazia Albanesi Dept. of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering University of Pavia Pavia, Italy Email: mariagrazia.albanesi@unipv.it Abstract—This paper describes a new application of the previous defined Forest Status Quality Indicator in planning policies of forest conservation. Starting from previous analysis and conclusions about the importance of the forest plantations for ecological restoration, new case studies confirm the possibility of using this indicator to efficiently guide policy makers and planners to choose the best position and extensions of forest types/patches for restoration and connectivity. By considering the present situation of the forest quality, we propose a method to compute a predicted value of the indicator by considering, in addition, the contribution of plantations, once they will be naturalized in the territory under consideration. The new, predicted value of the Forest Status Quality Indicator is a function of the ecological components, which are at the basis of the naturalistic approach of its definition. The results are shown on ten important case studies of plantations in the West Po Plain (North Italy). The method of prediction can be used to measure the impact of plantations on the quality of the forests and to define under which hypothesis they can play an important role in biodiversity conservation. Keywords-biodiversity; environmental indicator; forest status quality; Geographic Information Systems; conservation policy. I. INTRODUCTION This paper is based on the authors’ work [1] and reports the extension of their current research activity. Compared to [1], nine more case studies are added; moreover, the present paper provides the list of all the forest types found in the studied locations, which was not possible in the previous work. Finally, the theory about the ecological indicator, called Forest Status Quality (FSQ), already reported in [1], has been validated by showing a new application to the definition of policies for forest management and conservation. The previous target, i.e., to propose and measure indicators related to some specific aspects of biodiversity, within a given territory, has been extended to show how an indicator can be used to assess the efficacy of a policy of forest conservation. The naturalistic indicator FSQ has been introduced for the first time in literature with an investigation about its relationship with another ecological indicator, the land use Anthropentropy Factor [2][3]. However, the preliminary results were very promising in giving a realistic assessment of the situation of forests quality in a given territory. For this reason, the research has been carried further along this direction. Here, we recall from the previous contribution [1] some important aspects of FSQ indicator, in order to appreciate the improvement of the ongoing researches. In literature, the most common approach to define biodiversity indicators is to use separately the following primary attributes of biodiversity: (1) species/composition, (2) structure, and (3) function [4], or landscape metrics [5]. The main innovative feature of FSQ, with respect to literature, is the joined evaluation of species composition and structure and landscape metric. In fact, the biodiversity components are: the stratification, the percentage of alien species and the percentage of protected species. Stratification can be easily depicted in four layers: tree, high and low shrub, and herb layers (see Figure 1). Figure 2 shows some typical alien species in the territory under investigation. On the other hand, often protected species (see Figure 3) correspond to true forest species, such as Anemone nemorosa, Campanula trachelium, Carex elongata, Convallaria majalis, Listera ovata, Neottia nidus- avis, and Primula vulgaris. The three components characterize the different forest patches of the territory under investigation of the ten case studies. Furthermore, the FSQ indicator takes into account also a landscape feature, i.e., the size of the forest patches. Consequently, only patches greater than 10.000 square meters are considered. In fact, patches smaller than 1 ha generally show low species richness [6] and a scarce floristic quality due to the edge effect which can increase the abundance of weedy and alien species [7]-[9]. The richness and floristic quality (due to true forest species) of the forest patches can be influenced not only by their size, but also by their shape. However, a correlation between the shape and the species richness of forest patches can be found when the patch size is sufficiently high. In fact, Dzwonko and Loster [10][11] found a negative correlation between the shape index of Patton [12] and the number of shrubs and forest species. In that case, they worked with a restricted dataset of only 27 forests, with varying patch size from 0.03 to 1.6 ha. With such small patch sizes, it is possible that the entire patch was subject to the edge effects [13]. Honnay et al. [13] analyzed 234 forest patches varying 21 International Journal on Advances in Life Sciences, vol 9 no 1 & 2, year 2017, http://www.iariajournals.org/life_sciences/ 2017, © Copyright by authors, Published under agreement with IARIA - www.iaria.org