Un approccio allometrico-funzionale allo studio della complessità ecologica delle foreste vetuste

Old-growth forests represent complex ecological systems in which community structure emerges from the interaction of long-term processes operating under conditions of limited disturbance and near-saturation use of available resources. As such, they constitute fundamental reference systems for understanding forest functioning and for testing ecological models grounded in general principles. Th is study presents a methodological framework to describe and predict the structure of old-growth forests based on individual-level allometric relationships, under the assumption that the forest community fully exploits the available resources. By using crown volume as a proxy for individual resource use, and assuming complete resource utilization at the community level, we show that the diameter distribution emerges as a direct consequence of individual scaling laws and converges toward a distribution consistent with the Energetic Equivalence Principle (EEP). Th e approach, grounded in the so-called H-model, allows the slope of diameter (or height) distributions to be interpreted as a quantitative metric of old-growthness, disturbance intensity, and successional stage. Old-growth forests are thus proposed as functional reference systems for the study of ecological complexity and for the development of forest management strategies aligned with the principles of closer-to-nature silviculture.