"....I hope to have explained the necessity to be able to obtain in a short time an inventory of the pathogens observed on forest trees. This inventory mustn't be an arid list of species but it must indicate the distribution of each organism, the intensity of damage and the frequency of its manifestation and also the characteristic of the sites in which it appeared, besides all the news on the plantation techniques and the management of wood and it may deal the abnormal meteorological phenomena in the last years. The analysis and the pairing of a lot of these data will say what is the ecological value of each micro-organism in the environmental conditions where it was observed."
These statements of Prof. Antonio Biraghi were written in 1955 but they are still of great validity for forest pathologists. To correlate the biological data about pathogens with the environmental and site conditions is fundamental to explain diseases, decline or dieback phenomena and to propose the silvicultural measures able to minimise damages in forests. Unfortunately, for many of pathogens very few data are till now available and most of the times there are not historical series or it is not possible to compare the collected data, especially because of the great variability in site conditions showed by most of Italian woods. The Forest Research Unit of the Agriculture Institute of S. Michele a/Adige (ISMAA) has been dealing with the thematic regarding the forest health in all its aspects for about thirty years. Since 1990, it has been carrying out the Forest Trees Damages Monitoring (FTDM) of Trentino woods, in collaboration with the Forest Services of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Ambrosi et al, 1998; Ambrosi and Salvadori, 1998). In this monitoring program, the adopted methodology permits to obtain data on several pathogens and pests, many of which proved to be useful as bio-indicators of stress condition or of past forestry choices perhaps not really adapted to the environmental conditions. In this contest, the phytopatological monitoring showed to be a good tool for a better understanding of forest ecosystems mechanisms and could help the foresters in their planning.
All the monitoring data were referred to the woodland management plan compartments, which were defined for each public property in the Province. After nine years of observations, the need of managing the collected data (to obtain the cognition, foretold by Biraghi) suggests the improvement of a specific Geographic Information System (GIS). In this work we discuss how the data can be organised and how the system could be enhanced to help the forestry managers and forest pathologists in their works.