A georeferenced dataset of forest types and species across Italy

Description

The dataset provides information on forest type, crown cover and species composition of 934 georeferenced forest sample plots surveyed in the field. Plots are located in three study areas in Italy, one in the central-eastern Alps, one in central Apennines and the last one in the southern Apennines. The research was started in view of supporting the forest type classification within the Italian national forest inventory (NFI) by remote sensing data. Forest type was classified based on the crown cover of tree species but additional data on forest characters were recorded to complement information on tree species composition, such as the sylvicultural system, the development stage, the pure/mixture condition, crown layers and local land position. The data captured a wide range of values in the variables recorded and can be used together with those made available by the Italian NFI, increasing the number of observations in hand of users. The reference units for the forest type and species classification are 15 m radius circular plots, an expansion of the 13 m radius circular inventory plots, that were used as reference unit for the field surveys. Plot centres were co-registered with the centroids of the 30 m size pixels of the PRISMA images, and their position in the field was determined through a GNSS assisted procedure borrowed from the NFI survey protocol, having metric to sub-metric precision. The plots are located according to clusters, each representing one forest type. To avoid spatial autocorrelation, no adjacent plots were surveyed.

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