Deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions could arise when replacing palm oil with other vegetable oils.

Oil crops are among the main drivers of global land use changes. Palm oil is possibly the most criticized, as a driver of primary tropical forests loss. This has generated two different reactions in its use in various sectors (e.

A Phenological Model for Olive ( L. var ) Growing in Italy.

The calibration of a reliable phenological model for olive grown in areas characterized by great environmental heterogeneity, like Italy, where many varieties exist, is challenging and often suffers from a lack of observations, especially on budbreak. In this study, we used a database encompassing many phenological events from different olive varieties, years, and sites scattered all over Italy to identify the phases in which site-enlarged developmental rates can be well regressed against air temperature (Developmental Rate function, ) by testing both linear and nonlinear functions. A K-fold cross-validation (KfCV) was carried out to evaluate the ability of functions to predict phenological development.

Extending large-scale forest inventories to assess urban forests.

Urban areas are continuously expanding today, extending their influence on an increasingly large proportion of woods and trees located in or nearby urban and urbanizing areas, the so-called urban forests. Although these forests have the potential for significantly improving the quality the urban environment and the well-being of the urban population, data to quantify the extent and characteristics of urban forests are still lacking or fragmentary on a large scale. In this regard, an expansion of the domain of multipurpose forest inventories like National Forest Inventories (NFIs) towards urban forests would be required.