Mountain forests provide protection against different kinds of natural hazards. This protective function is clearly
identified in the first paragraph of the Mountain Forest Protocol of the Alpine Convention of 1996 where it says
that mountain forests provide the most effective, the least expensive and the most aesthetic protection against natural hazards. Although techniques for stand stability of protection forests are well exploited by the forest experts,
systematic studies quantifying the protection effect of a forest against rockfall are limited. Hence, the collected
national and international guidelines and recommendations as well as other relevant literature will act as base-line
from which different point of views of different experts can be summarized and analyzed. Within the Interreg
Alpine Space project RockTheAlps, we therefore performed an in-depth analysis of state of the art recommendations and guidelines for sylvicultural management that primarily protects against rockfall in the European Alps.
To provide a foundation for a systematic study of the above noted relevant forest parameters we apply Q methodological approach. Q methodology enables us to identify and to describe the diversity expert’s knowledge of forest protection management strategies against rockfall risk prevention. In this way various attitudes, experiences and observations are understood and shown as qualitative data, whereas not every relevant parameter is evaluated independently of the others, but all parameters are related to each other
