The provision of river areas in the General Plan for the Use of Public Waters of the Autonomous Province of Trento - PGUAP - was certainly an enlightened and farsighted decision, where river ecosystems are considered for their ecological function. A valid classification of ecological river areas is based on an in-depth evaluation of the main morphological, structural and biotic parameters of the ecosystem in question, interpreted in the light of the principles of river ecology and the IFF is a method aimed at evaluating ecological functionality of the river ecosystem. In order to obtain an updated and homogeneous IFF database for the entire provincial network, the "Application of the IFF to the hydrographic network of the provincial territory" project was activated in 2009. The working group of the Environmental Protection Agency has applied the IFF on all the typified waterways of the province for a total of 1509 km, walking along the waterways from the confluence with the main receptor end at an altitude of 1800 m, the ultimate limit of application of the Index due to the scarce presence of tree-shrub vegetation. The organization, arrangement and archiving of data in a database called the IFF database of Trentino, has improved their use also for consultation and visualization of the results on a map, as well as for their dissemination on the net.
