News from the Italian Parks

The actions provided by the "Praterie" project carry on positively according to the plans. Once finished all the preliminary operations concerning the data collection, the grazing legislation, the questionnaires and the useful information obtained during the many technical and veterinary surveys, and once compared them to the "Carta della Natura" (Nature Map), it has been possible to obtain an integrated and consistent picture of the project area, which can function as a basis to plan the structural interventions for the tourism and the grazing activity, and the launch of the actions relating to the "human dimension", that is the participatory process for the grazing harmonization, with a first workshop about it taking place on upcoming Tuesday 26th November.

The aim of the Action A5 - Assessment of the farming management problems, has been fully achieved by the veterinarians in charge, who visited 107 farms against the 100 planned. As far as the action C1 is concerned, the phase of the expressions of interest for the entrusting of the materials necessary to build the protection structures has been launched. Within the same field (Action C2 - Fostering homogeneous grazing practices) also the experimental phase of the tensile structures for the shelter of the lambs has ended. Even in this case, since the experimentation showed good and positive results, the procedures for the expressions of interest will be started soon in order to give out a certain number of tensile structures to the farmers all over the territory.

As far as the structural interventions for tourism are concerned, the cartography of the project area will be the basis to intervene with naturalistic engineering works for the renovation of the damaged paths. Concerning the interventions for the pastures, all the drinking troughs present all over the project area have been surveyed. Among them, depending on the needs expressed by the farmers on the occasion of the visits to the farms carried out by the veterinarians, a priority scale of intervention has been developed.

At the same time, considering the technical-scientific support of recent studies, the conditions and the conservation priorities of the altitude small lakes have been assessed. The first interventions concerning the Pietranzoni lake and a karst spring will be therefore implemented within the next spring. A second cycle of interventions will be implemented within October 2014, and in the following years also the other springs will be renovated.