g., avalanches, debris flows, rock-falls, causing problems of particular relevance for protection forests services ( Brang et al., 2006 and Beghin et al., 2010), including water supply. Moreover, large fires at the rural–urban interface involve civil protection issues ( Höchtl et al., 2005 and Ascoli and Bovio, 2010) and increasing costs due to post-fire restoration ( Beghin et al.,

2010, Wohlgemuth et al., 2010 and Ascoli et al., 2013a). On the contrary, the second generation of large fires, e.g., in the south-western Alps in 1989–90, characterized by mixed severity effects, i.e., a mosaic of low, intermediate and high severity stand replacing phases, might promote structural and species diversity in formerly exploited forests (e.g., chestnut and beech coppice woodlands, conifer

plantations) that are now no more managed, thus accelerating Smad inhibition the transition to alternative ecosystem states dominated by semi-natural ecological processes, e.g., Moretti et al. (2006), Maringer et al. (2012), Ascoli et al. (2013a), Fernandes et al. (2013), which is the aim of forest management in most unproductive forested areas of the Alps. Concerns about the long-term consequences of uncharacteristic fire regimes, and expected benefits from planning fire use, recently gave rise to a discussion about the suitability of implementing prescribed burning programmes in the Alpine environment (Lemonnier-Darcemont, 2003, Bernard-Laurent and Weber, 2007, Lyet et al., 2009, Valese et al., 2011b and Ascoli et al., 2013b). In particular, prescribed see more burning has been applied since the beginning of the 1980s over relatively large areas in the French Alps (e.g., ∼2000 ha yr−1 in the Department of Alpes Maritimes) both to regulate pastoral fire use (Fig. 8) and to abate fire risk by periodically reducing hazardous fuels in fuel Chlormezanone breaks strategically placed in the landscape (Fernandes et al., 2013). Long-term results (>20

yrs) of prescribed burning programmes in the French Alps have shown a shift from a fire regime characterized by uncontrolled fires, usually on high fire danger days, with a high inter-annual variability in overall burnt area, to a prescribed burning regime of lower severity and on a yearly planned area (Réseau Brûlage Dirigé, 2012). Experimental prescribed burning for similar objectives has also been carried out in the Italian Alps (Ascoli and Bovio, 2013), both to prevent the surreptitious use of fire by shepherds and to preserve habitats of interest included in the Habitat Directive (HD) 92/43/EEC, such as Calluna heathlands (cod. HD: 4030) in the western Alps ( Ascoli et al., 2013b), eastern sub-Mediterranean dry grasslands (Scorzoneretalia villosae – cod. HD: 62A0) and lowland hay meadows (Alopecurus pratensis, Sanguisorba officinalis – cod. HD: 6510) in the eastern Alps ( Valese et al., 2011b).