The experimental Bonis basin: Integrated monitoring in a forest ecosystems

The aim of the present research was to evaluate the role of forests in the hydrological processes which occur in an experimental watershed in southern Italy. Moreover, the analysis also involved studies of forest carbon uptake. In this paper, a long-term study was performed in the Bonis watershed, a mountain basin located in Sila Greca (Calabria). Since 1986 the catchment has been instrumented and rain, runoff, throughfall, stemflow and some climatic parameters have been measured. Subsequently, in order to study carbon and water cycle dynamics (for climate change mitigation assessment) and to give information about the amount of water used by plants, a tower with Eddy covariance technique was installed. The study concerned the analysis of precipitation and of the interaction between forest cover and throughfall, stemflow and runoff after a thinning treatment. Investigation on CO2 and evapotranspiration with Eddy covariance methodology has also been performed. As a result, at watershed scale, after thinning, runoff coefficient increased from 0.21 to 0.29 during the autumn-winter period, while in the summer season it shifted from 0.16 to 0.41. The results obtained evidenced that forests regulate soil water content availability and are important for water regimentation, especially in Mediterranean environments. The research activities on the basin are still in progress thanks to the PONa3_00363 - Infrastruttura AMICA and PON03PE_00024_1 - Ambi.Tec.Fil.Legno projects which allowed the improvement of the instruments and to verify the ongoing processes and their relation to climate change.