Born Siena, February 3, 1952.
Full professor of Statistics from the Department of Economic and Statistics of the University of Siena. Head of the Department of Quantitative Methods of the University of Siena for the years 2000-2003 and 2009-2010.
His research interests concern sampling theory with focus on sampling strategies for surveying animal and plant communities to estimate and to map abundance, coverage and ecological diversity. He has cooperated with naturalists in several environmental surveys (see publications). Among others, he has planned the sampling strategy adopted in the 2000-07 Italian National Forest Inventory, introducing the use of tessellation stratified sampling in a national inventory (subsequently adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture in its national inventories). He has planned the Regional Forest Inventory of Sicily (2008-2010) and has structured the estimation strategies for the remotely-sensed Italian Land Use Inventory (IUTI, 2009-2010). In 2010-2012 he has planned the Agrit Agro-Environmental Survey, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policies (MIPAAF) to assess interaction between agriculture and natural resources from the quantification of ecological structures such as streams, ponds, hedgerows, tree rows, stone walls, and isolated trees. In June 2011 he contributed to the FAO world expert meeting on “Assessment of forest inventory approaches for REDD+”.
He is Associate Editors of Environmetrics , Environmental and Ecological Statistics and Statistical Methods & Applications. From 2006-2009 he has directed the new-born Working Group on Methodologies for Sample Surveys of the Italian Statistical Society. In 2017 he joined the Scientific Committee of the Maremma Regional Park (Central Italy). He is member of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS), elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), member of the International Environmetric Society (TIES) and of the International Association of Survey Statisticians (IASS)