Setting Up Optimal Meteorological Networks: An Example From Italy

A permanent assessment of climate regime in forest sites has a key role in forest resource conservation and preservation of ecosystem services, biodiversity and landscape multi-functionality, informing sustainable forest management. In this view, time-series of meteorological data relative to several monitoring sites from the ICP-Forest network in Italy, were analyzed with the aim to define the number of site-specific observations, which can be considered adequate for further analysis on forest resource management. The relative importance of each factor accounted in our analysis (season, year, variable, plot, sampling proportion) was investigated comparing results through the use of descriptive statistics.