| Summary: | Usually scarce attention is devoted to pastoral resources in forest planning activities in Italy. The limited importance often given to these resources, the inadequate skills of forest technicians, as well as the need to reduce the cost of sampling procedures, frequently lead to generic management suggestions to be included in forest plans. The above reasons call for new methods of pasture parameters assessment, combining fast data collection with high informative content on extant pastoral resources. The present study reports the results of the comparison between an accurate though time-consuming method for assessing the potential stocking rate (method of the "pastoral value", commonly-used for analytical studies) and a fast procedure that simplifies the vegetation composition sampling, to classify pastures in different categories of quality. A number of case studies on pasture analysis previously carried out in different environments (ranging from Alpine to Apennines areas) have been considered, and the efficiency of the simplified method in the assessment of the potential stocking rate evaluated. The results reported here strengthen the reliability of the simplified procedure for the evaluation of pastoral resources in the compilation of forest managing plans. Further investigation are needed to consolidate the findings reported here for mountain areas and to farther extend the applicability of the proposed method to other environments.
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