Participant ID: 1 - Università degli Studi della Tuscia (UNITUS)
	http://gaia.agraria.unitus.it/english.html http://www.unitus.it/

Expertise and experience The Department of Forest Science and Environment (DISAFRI) of University of Tuscia is composed by 11 full time permanent scientists working in the field of forest research with a major aim in understanding the biological processes and interactions from the scale of plants to the ecosystem and regional problems, with a major emphasis on biogeochemical cycles. In the course of time DISAFRI has developed new techniques in the field of canopy fluxes of carbon, water, energy and volatile compounds, modelling of ecosystem biogeochemical cycles, remote sensing of forest ecosystems processes.
The Department gained considerable expertise in managing national and international projects (CEE EPOCH and STEP, EUREKA, ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE projects: Euroflux coordination, Bema, Canif, Vocamod, Medeflu, Eurasianet - coordination, NASA projects: FLUXNET) dealing with carbon, energy and water cycling, ozone formation, ecosystem modelling and remote sensing. The Department has coordinated the carbon projects CARBODATA (EVK2-CT1999-00044) and CARBOEUROFLUX (EVK2-CT1999-00032), which participate in the CarboEurope cluster. At the moment the Department is coordinating the project CARBOEUROPE-GHG (EVK2-2002-20014). Role in this project UNITUS will have the main role as overall project co-ordinator. WP1: adapt the CarboeuropeIP methods for standardization, gapfilling and partitioning of Eddy covariance measurement to the African datasets; build the database for flux measurement, ancillary data and satellite/spatialized data; eddy tower in Gabon. WP2: ecological surveys at selected flux tower sites. WP3: parameterize and run the ANN model. WP4: contribution to the parameterization of combustion models WP5: contribution to workshop and training courses. WP6: analysis and evaluation of eligibility of Kyoto protocol CDM projects. Principal Investigator and collaborators Riccardo Valentini is full professor of Forest Ecology at the University of Tuscia. His expertise concerns canopy processes, particularly eddy covariance measurements and modelling of carbon dioxide and water vapour fluxes, volatile organic compounds exchanges and biophysical and physiological studies on forest trees. His recent studies concerned the role of land use changes and forestry in the carbon cycle and biodiversity and regionalization studies of biospheric exchanges at the continental scale. He is also involved through IPCC and governmental bodies on policies about the global carbon cycle and the role of land use changes and forestry. He is coordinator of several EU projects in the CARBOEUROPE cluster aiming to understand and quantify the terrestrial carbon budget. Chair of the Italian National Global Change committee. Chairman of the Terrestrial Carbon Observation panel of GTOS. He published more than 100 papers in scientific journals. Dario Papale, Dr., is research assistant at the University of Tuscia. His work primarily concerned remote sensing application to forest ecology and in particular to spatialization of terrestrial carbon fluxes at regional and continental scale. He is responsible of the flux tower data center of the CarboEurope project. Antonio Bombelli, PhD, Biologist, his expertise concerns plant ecophysiology, focusing on photosynthetic activity, water use efficiency, phenotypic plasticity, leaf anatomy and morphology, in order to define plant adaptive strategies to natural (especially drought) and anthropogenic stress. Renato Zompanti, technician, has many years of experience in field works, biological sampling, and instrument maintenance and calibration. Example publications