After large and severe wildfires, the establishment of tree regeneration, particularly for species without specific fire-adaptive traits, can be challenging. Within harsh environments, the presence of favorable microsites, as those provided by deadwood, enhancing microclimatic conditions, is crucial to the re-establishment of forest cover and thus to foster recovery dynamics. Active restoration strategies can have an impact on these dynamics, altering or hindering them. The main hypothesis of this study is that manipulating deadwood in terms of quantity and spatial arrangement can result in differences in natural regeneration density and composition. Post-disturbance regeneration dynamics and the role played by deadwood over time in the creation of safe sites for seedling establishment were investigated in an area affected by a high-severity wildfire that underwent different post-fire restoration treatments along a gradient of increasing deadwood manipulation, spanning from salvage logging to non-intervention. Two inventories were performed 5 and 11 years after the fire. Ground cover proportion was significantly different among treatments, with lower values of lying deadwood in salvaged sites. A higher probability of regeneration establishment close to deadwood was found in both surveys, confirming the facilitating role of deadwood on post-fire forest regeneration. Microsite dynamics resulting from deadwood facilitation were highlighted, with establishment probability and anisotropic relationships between deadwood elements and seedlings changing over time, as recovery processes slowly improved environmental conditions. In dry mountain areas affected by stand-replacing wildfires, by removing deadwood, salvage logging reduces the number of safe sites for regeneration, further impairing the ecosystem recovery. Passive management should be the ecologically preferred management strategy in these conditions, although intermediate interventions (e.g., felling without delimbing, leaving deadwood on the ground) could be effective alternatives, accelerating snag fall dynamics and immediately increasing favorable microsite availability.

Purpose of Review: Forests produce timber, mitigate climate change and provide important habitats; yet their capacity to provide these services under rapid global change is uncertain. “Closer-to-nature” forest management (CNFM) has been proposed by the EU Forest Strategy as a way to reconcile competing demands on forests while enhancing their resilience, but experiences with its implementation remain limited. We synthesized expert knowledge about CNFM in Central Europe, a region with a history of diverse forest management practices that has recently experienced severe impacts of climate change. We used a two-stage Delphi approach (including a questionnaire and a workshop) with experts in forest ecology and management to find a consensus about the effects of specific CNFM tools, and to identify knowledge gaps, barriers, and good practice examples of CNFM. Recent Findings: A wider implementation of CNFM is likely to benefit biodiversity and ecosystem services under climate change, with only one clear trade-off identified between setting areas aside and wood production. However, limited empirical evidence exists for many of the expected effects. Substantial obstacles hinder the implementation of CNFM, including administrative constraints, social barriers, and gaps in knowledge and education. Nonetheless, we identified numerous successful cases of CNFM implementation from local to national scales in Central Europe. Summary: CNFM is viewed as a potent strategy to navigate future social and ecological uncertainties, including large-scale disturbances. However, the implementation of CNFM should be adapted to the local context and ensure landscape-scale heterogeneity. Existing good practices could serve as examples for mainstreaming CNFM in Central Europe and beyond.

After stand-replacing windstorm salvage logging is the most common practice for recovering economic losses in managed forests and for reducing the risk of subsequent disturbances (e.g. bark beetle outbreaks). To restore forest cover timely after these interventions is therefore necessary, in order to limit the reduction of forest ecosystem services (ES) provision. In the first years following the disturbance and subsequent interventions, there is a need to monitor natural regeneration dynamics in damaged areas, in order to implement active restoration activities if necessary. In this study, we analyze the natural regeneration dynamics in 148 areas damaged by storm Vaia (2018) and salvage logged with different techniques in Northeast of Italy. Results show that regeneration species composition is driven mainly by previous stand composition, with some exceptions depending on seed dispersal strategy. Distance from the edge significantly influences the regeneration occurrence in large gaps and affects the browsing damage percentage, together with deadwood presence. Moreover, site factors, disturbance legacies, and logging methods reveal to be key points to consider in the post-disturbance management strategies definition. To reduce economic losses and exploit the windthrown areas in the short-term, it is possible to integrate reforestation with agroforestry practices (e.g. berries and honey production). This is the framework of the LIFE VAIA project, which aims to integrate innovative local agroforestry practices with artificial regeneration to restore forest cover, increasing the value of forest ecosystems and the ecological and socio-economical resilience of damaged forest ecosystems under future climate changes.

When large and severe disturbances affect mountain forests, their ability to provide fundamental ecosystem services may be impaired for a long time. Indeed, in the Alps, forested slopes exert a crucial protective function and rapidly restoring the forest cover after a stand-replacing event is key to prevent the occurrence and mitigate the impact of subsequent natural hazards. Post-disturbance intervention can make or break forest recovery and should thus be tailored to meet management requirements and ecological needs. Widespread salvage logging removing all deadwood and other biological legacies in harsh environments where natural regeneration relies on facilitation mechanisms is a classical example of human intervention leading to undesired consequences. Quite often, when time is not a constraint, passive restoration can be the best option. Whenever active restoration is deemed necessary, particularly when large areas are affected, several challenges and limitations have to be addressed. Lack of saplings supply from tree nurseries, specialized workers and funding availability can hamper restoration activities.Some lessons learnt from mountain forests of the Italian Alps will be presented, considering restoration interventions after forest fires, windthrows and bark beetle outbreaks. Taking advantage of biological legacies, assisted regeneration and applied nucleation provided encouraging results, with nature-based solutions proving to be effective in promptly restoring the ecosystem services provided by forests, especially in protective stands.

Post-fire regeneration in Mediterranean pine forests is increasingly constrained by recurrent high-severity fires and post-disturbance interventions. We assessed the drivers of early natural regeneration in a coastal Pinus halepensis Mill. forest in Spotorno (NW Italy) affected by two recent high-severity wildfires (September 2006 and July 2015) followed by salvage logging. Pine seedlings were mapped in spring 2025 with an RTK GNSS antenna, while high-resolution UAV images and LiDAR products were used to derive terrain- and forest structure-based predictors. Topographically mediated constraints on regeneration were quantified using the Topographic Wetness Index (TWI) and the Heat Load Index (HLI), which capture spatial variation in soil moisture accumulation and heat exposure. Seed availability was represented by the distance to remnant adult pines, identified from the canopy height model using a local-maximum filtering approach. Spatial point pattern analysis (inhomogeneous Ripley’s K and pair correlation) was used to test whether empirically evident regeneration clusters reflected plant–plant interactions, or environmentally-driven density variation. Drivers of regeneration were modelled using GLMs, GAMs and Random Forests (RF), and two pseudo-absence strategies in the RF were explicitly compared by training models with (i) ecologically informed, spatially homogeneous pseudo-absences and (ii) randomly sampled pseudo-absences. The informed pseudo-absence Random Forest achieved substantially higher discrimination (AUC = 0.895; ACC = 0.821; SEN = 0.785; SPE = 0.864) than the random-absence model (AUC = 0.653; ACC = 0.607; SEN = 0.648; SPE = 0.571). The best model was applied to generate a 5 x 5 m ecological suitability map identifying regeneration “hotspots”, i.e., near seed sources under warm, well-drained microsite conditions, and persistent “coldspots” in convergent terrain and seed-limited areas. This workflow provides an operational, transferable basis for precision-oriented post-fire restoration planning in Mediterranean landscapes where passive recovery is uncertain.