Lecturers: Cristiano Vernesi, Mirco Rodeghiero, Damiano Gianelle, Loris Vescovo, Roberto Zampedri, Michele Dalponte, Luca Belelli Marchesini.

Summary: Four modules of lectures and practicals will provide fundamental knowledge of genetic, ecosystem and global forest biodiversity and the impact on productivity.

Module 1 (8 hours): Genetic biodiversity: the foundation of adaptation. This module will provide a general overview of the importance and estimating of the first component of biological diversity to adaptation to ongoing and future global change, using specific examples from forest ecosystems.

Skills acquired:  Knowledge of most updated techniques used in forest genomics along with basic theoretical introduction to population genetics.

Module 2 (8 hours): New tools for investigating leaf and ecosystem processes. This module will give practical insights into photosynthesis and respiration measurements within forests at the leaf and ecosystem level using of modern instruments, as well as climate change effects on ecosystems productivity and biodiversity. 

Skills acquired: Laboratory and field measurements; introduction to the main approaches to data analysis.

Module 3 (4 hours): Upscaling to regional and global scales. This module will describe the issues and possibilities of upscaling measurements to regional and global scales using remote sensing and modelling approaches.

Skills acquired: practical methods for data upscaling.

Module 4 (4 hours): Forest Carbon Inventories. The module will offer an overview of the data and information obtainable from a Forest Inventory with particular focus on carbon stocks in a climate change perspective.

Skills acquired: real data from forest inventories will be elaborated for the calculation of carbon stocks and fluxes.

Course schedule

Evaluation procedure: presentation and/or report