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Fire is an integral treatment or a disturbance process to restore mature forests. The way this disturbance process is implemented depends largely on the management objectives. Natural fire (lightning) is only feasible currently during favourable meteorological conditions and in ordered and planned spaces, as long as it is transformed into management burning and the corresponding protocols are followed. Even in these environments, additional vigilance, monitoring and control of the effects is required until this practice is fully accepted by society.

This volume should be interpreted as a manual of best practices for sustainable forest management deriving from the experience of the project LIFE09ENV/IT/000078 ManFor C.BD coordinated by the National Research Council through the Institute of Agro-environmental and Forest Biology (CNR-IBAF). The other Project partners are: the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA), the University of Molise (UNIMOL), the Slovenian Forestry Institute (SFI) and the regions of Veneto and Molise. In addition, the National Centre for Forest Biodiversity of Verona and the Regional Office to biodiversity of Castel di Sangro of the Italian National Forest Service (CFS), as well as the Slovenian Forest Service (SFS) collaborated to the project. This manual consists of several individual articles dealing with specific issues related to the project. These articles are conceptually organized into five categories that from the description of the project and of its activities arrive at providing operative indications for forestry operators. The papers published in this volume can generally be read as self-standing studies disentangling specific issues of forest science but, more effectively, they can be seen as individual parts of a unique process of learning that from experience generates knowledge. In this light, the reader will have the possibility of going directly to the paper which he is interested in, he can use uniquely the final list of practical suggestions (Di Salvatore et al., 2016b) as a ‘field guide’, or he can go through the entire manual and understanding the source of the best practices for sustainable forestry.

This Manual describes the method to be used, from preparing the sampling design to recording and exploiting the data. It is supplemented by a practical guide for the field work for use by the persons in charge of carrying it out. The Field Guide is designed to be used without reference to the Manual but to avoid repetitions not all the rules given in the Field Guide are written in the Manual. Thus, both documents are necessary to have a complete description of the method. In this Manual and in the Field Guide the method is called ForFireS.

This guide is destined to the field crews in charge of the observations and measures required to assess the severity of the forest fires according to the ForFireS method adopted by the European Union. The observations and measurements are carried out on plots set around a point whose position has been previously determined in the office. In the guide the following information are given: The rules to search for a point in the field; Plot description and setting procedure; Data description and collection procedure; The rules for data recording.