Mountain Lab

The objectives of the course are to:
- know the tools of sustainable forest management.
- know the ecological processes in the forest environment and the mechanisms of interaction between forests and natural hazards.
- know the behavior of forest fires.
- know the tools for preventing and mitigating the risk of forest fires.
- know the natural hazards in mountain areas, with particular reference to superficial landslides, debris flows and solid and wood material transport.
- know the fundamentals of nivology and the characteristics of high-altitude soils and artificial detachment techniques.
- understand the interactions between snow and soil processes and the contribution of avalanches to erosion.
- learn the methods for conducting analysis and risk assessment based on natural hazards through quantitative methods and models.
- know the main methods of risk reduction through structural and biological methods.
- to know the economic mechanisms linked to the production of externalities, to their evaluation and to environmental policy tools aimed at internalization.
- know the methods of economic and financial evaluation of interventions on the forest and mountain environment, with particular reference to public interventions.

At the end of the course the student should:
- be able to analyze the ecological processes in the main types of mountain forests.
- be able to interpret forest planning documents.
- know how to measure and quantify the effectiveness of the protective function of forests against rockfall and avalanches.
- be able to assess the danger related to forest fires.
- know how to formulate management decisions to increase the resistance and resilience of forests to natural hazards.
- know how to locate intervention priorities.
- know how to interpret and draw up the main lines of a plan for safeguarding the territory from hydrogeological risk and forest fires.
- be able to analyse the main natural hazards in mountain areas, and to draw up the relative risk maps.
- know how to apply the main methods to assess the characteristics of soils and snow in mountain areas.
- know how to apply the tools for preventing and mitigating the risk deriving from erosion and movements of the snowpack, both slow (snow gliding) and fast (avalanches).
- know how to apply the main methods of assessing externalities (contingent assessment, choice modeling).
- know how to set up a cost / benefit analysis extended to environmental components.