Tree damage due to wartime events in a forest on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni (Vicenza - Italy)

Abstract

The WW1 events that affected many mountain areas in north-eastern Italy hit not only the social and economic structures through the destruction of towns and villages and consequent flight of the populations, but also environmental resources such as pastures, meadows, fields and forests. The forests were affected both by damage from the artillery used on the battlefields and that due to exploitation for the logistical requirements of the armies. The effects of artillery damage are still in evidence today as different sized pieces of metal lodged in the wood of the trees. The presence of metal is a severe defect which heavily influences the selling price of the wood and affects its processing. In order to acquire experimental data which allow the quantity of metal fragments and their diffusion in the trees to be precisely determined, an empirical study was carried out in a forest compartment on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni (Vicenza - Italy). The results show the tree diameter classes in which metal fragments are more common and promote the advantage of using metal-detector scanning compared to the simple adoption of a discount at auction