Silvio Anderloni, 63 years old, was the director of the Urban Forestation Center “Boscoincittà”. The park in Via Novara, open to the public, withstood the violent storm that hit on the night of July 24th and 25th better than other city green areas. Out of 90,000 plants, “only” 69 trees were lost, which is 0.08% of the 120-hectare oasis, created in 1974 as an urban forestation center. Specifically, 32 trees were uprooted and 37 were broken in two.
“Oak trees fell, especially the red ones, which, being non-native species, have long been less suitable, and also some elm and ash trees. It’s not certain that they were sick: winds over a hundred kilometers per hour and pouring rain are a deadly mix even for healthy plants. However, the life of the forest continues: in a year, the biomass will be the same, because the space of the fallen trees will be occupied by new branches,” explains Silvio Anderloni, 63, who until the end of July was the director of the Urban Forestation Center of Italia Nostra, the association that manages the park.
“I came to Boscoincittà as a volunteer scout in 1974. In 1984, I quit my job as a teacher to become a worker. They thought I was crazy. There were only two of us working…” he reveals. Today, there are more than 16 employees, in addition to a network of volunteers. The new director is Gianluca Vargiu. “The fact that it is a mixed-age forest, with trees of different ages, and multispecific (with different species) is one of the reasons why the oasis has withstood better. In Veneto (where in 2018 the Vaia storm left millions of red spruces on the ground) there was a disaster because the wind hit monospecific and same-aged forests, which are more fragile,” explains Anderloni.
Resilience is also the result of careful human intervention: “The urban forest needs to be pruned, thinned out, and renewed. Cutting down trees should not be a taboo: not only for safety reasons, as they can cause accidents if they collapse, but also for forest management purposes.” We roughly cut about 20/30 trunks per year. Unfortunately, not everyone understands, and there are even those who accuse us of doing it to sell firewood…”.
What can be done to improve tree life in an anthropic environment? “Prune when necessary and leave each plant a meter of good soil. Otherwise, it becomes less resistant and more susceptible to fungi. And never park too close: accidental hits from cars on the trunks are the most common cause of death among young trees,” emphasizes Anderloni.
