Find here other ongoing projects and initiatives that OptFor-EU partners collaborate with, sharing results and supporting each other in communication activities. You will for instance find us collaborating in events, papers and briefs. As more and more projects are delivered and generate valuable outputs and policy recommendations, it was time to gather and build on each other’s strength and knowledge!
The overarching ambition of EUFORE is to greatly improve the sector’s research and innovation funding and governance structure.
The project aims to develop a sustainable, transnational, co-creative environment to define, implement and evaluate research and innovation (R&I) agenda and roadmap for the entire forest-based value chains in Europe.
FORGENIUS project— an H2020 project, funded by the EU — will give an insight into the diversity of European forests and their resilience to climate change. The project uses state-of-the-art technology and knowledge in plant and evolutionary biology, ecology, remote-sensing, genomics, genetics, modelling, and forestry. It aims to upgrade the current European Information System on Forest Genetic Resources (EUFGIS) platform, by adding new types of data and information on the Genetic Conservation Units (GCU), allowing predictions of the fate of European forests in the short, medium, and long term. Such a tool will be the key to invent new, adaptive strategies to preserve these extraordinary natural assets at the continental level.
FOR-ES is a four-year sustainable forestry project which began in Q4 of 2021, a collaboration between natural scientists in Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin and practitioners in Coillte, funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM).
The project will use Natural Capital Accounting approaches to co-develop tools for sustainable forestry management decision-making. Unless forestry is managed in a way that recognises the multiple benefits it provides, with decisions made to explicitly consider these additional values, they could become ignored.
This project will develop Natural Capital Accounts for specific forest sites. These accounts will capture information on forest natural capital STOCKS (the amount, location and condition of forest habitats), and the FLOWS of ecosystem services (in terms of commercial timber production, carbon sequestration, water retention, biodiversity and recreation). Bayesian Belief Network modelling will be used to understand the effects of different management decisions on ecosystem service flows, and an interactive web-based management scenario tool will be developed.
ONEforest offers A Multi-Criteria Decision Support System For A Common Forest Management to Strengthen Forest Resilience, Harmonise Stakeholder Interests and Ensure Sustainable Wood Flows.
ONEforest will provide solutions for harmonizing various Forest Ecosystem Services. Thus, forest owners will be able to assess which way of forest management is advantageous for their objectives under current and future ecological and economic conditions.
Forests that are resilient to the climates of the future and capable of improving the performance of their ecosystem services are key to developing and strengthening a powerful forest bioeconomy in Europe. The OptFORESTS project aims to work towards the future adaptation of forests by harnessing Forest Genetic Resources (FGR), and supporting their conservation and sustainable use through the following main lines of work and objectives: – Conducting research on the selection of diverse forest reproductive material (FRM), including mixtures, adapted to future climates – Fostering sustainable use and resilience of natural forests – Helping expand and diversify nursery production – Developing nature-based solutions (NBS), tools (e.g, expanded Information Systems) and cultural trajectories to promote forest biodiversity and ecosystem services – Demonstrating biodiversity solutions.
The overall aim of eco2adapt is to help stakeholders manage forests to optimise social and ecological resilience. Using the concept of nature-based solutions, the project combines interdisciplinary knowledge from scientists and stakeholders in Europe and China to understand perception and provide incentivization for adapting management and policy.
CLIMB-FOREST is bringing together eighteen organisations from across Europe for 4.5 years.
Using the latest research and forestry data, CLIMB-FOREST will create new tools, interactive maps and best practice guidance.
Through close collaboration with the forestry sector and policy makers, CLIMB-FOREST aims to ensure Europe’s forests are resilient to the changing climate and support people and nature.
Around Europe, there are hundreds of small projects promoted by small groups of farmers, researchers, forest managers, environmental associations and local communities, that all share the same goal; advancing innovation and good practices in forestry and agroforestry sectors. These initiatives are known as “Operational Groups” (OG) and are usually financed by regional and European funding, in the context of the EIP-AGRI platform. However, the innovations and best practices developed, tend to remain in the local environments and do not reach other European communities or OGs beyond the national borders, losing in turn precious know-how and experiences.
The GOFORESTS project has the mission of tackling this problem, connecting dozens of OGs around Europe, and favouring the transfer of knowledge and best practices between experts of forestry and agroforestry sectors in 9 member states.
ForestNavigator aims at assessing the climate mitigation potential of European forests and forest-based sectors through modelling of policy pathways, consistent with the best standards of LULUCF reporting, and informing the public authorities on the most suitable approach to forest policy and bioeconomy.
With a primarily European scope, ForestNavigator zooms into carefully selected EU Member States to enhance the consistency of the EU and national pathways, but the project also zooms out towards the global scale, and selected key EU trading partners, accounting for extra-EU future drivers and potential leakage effects.
To help meet these potentially divergent targets, ForestPaths will provide clear policy pathways that outline alternative trajectories for how European forests and the forest-based sector can help climate change mitigation, while conserving their biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services. Across-the-board stakeholders, such as forest owners, practitioners, researchers and policymakers, will be engaged in four demo cases and four policy labs to co-design and evaluate policy pathways, which will be quantified through next-generation integrated assessment techniques. The generated policy pathways will be available on ForestPaths’ interactive CANOPY policy support platform, tailored for use by national and regional European authorities.
HoliSoils – Holistic management practices, modelling and monitoring for European forest soils – is an ongoing Horizon 2020 project (May 2021- October 2025) to develop a harmonised soil monitoring framework. It identifies and tests soil management practices aiming to mitigate climate change and sustain provision of various ecosystem services essential for human livelihoods and wellbeing.
HoliSoils incorporates novel methodologies and expert knowledge on analytical techniques, data sharing, soil properties and biodiversity, and processes with model development. It develops tools for soil monitoring, refines GHG assessment of the LULUCF sector, enhances efficiency of GHG mitigation actions, and improves numerical forecasting of soil-based mitigation, adaptation, and ecosystem services.
While the threats caused by climate change are beginning to be well-known amongst stakeholders concerned with forests and even the general public, the need to increase the resilience of our forests and especially the value chains depending on them has gained less attention. Therefore, both proper advice and related tools for forest owners and managers, policy makers and the wood-based industry are lacking. That gap of knowledge is exactly what the H2020 project RESONATE is tackling. It researches on the resilience of the European forest sector, raises awareness about forest resilience and provides best practice examples and tailor-made solutions to all stakeholders.
With 36 partners in 16 countries, led by the European Forest Institute and co-coordinated by Wageningen Environmental Research, SUPERB aims to restore thousands of hectares of forest landscape across Europe. To implement this, we will link practical and scientific knowledge to be synergistically transformed into action and create an enabling environment for future-oriented forest restoration, including required adaptation measures (=prestoration) at different scales.
FORWARDS will prototype The ForestWard Observatory to provide (a) timely and detailed information on European forests’ vulnerability to climate change impacts, (b) science-based knowledge to guide management using the principles of climate-smart forestry, ecosystem restoration, and biodiversity preservation (CSF & Restoration), and (c) stakeholder engagement and public participation in decision-making processes. We capitalize on data from existing networks (e.g. ICP Forests) and expand this with a Network of Pilot sites through 5 FORWARDS Demo cases plus ~50 trials established via grants to third parties.
Crucial questions on how to manage existing forests for enhanced carbon capture, where and how to grow new forests and how to adapt to more frequent disturbances remain partially unanswered by science, unaddressed by policies and unexplored by carbon offsetting schemes. INFORMA will thus pair up technological tools such as satellite imagery, data mining, and climate and ecosystem modelling with participatory approaches to bridge the gap between stakeholders working in the field and science, policy, carbon markets and society in general. All this while considering various types of forest-climate interactions and the provision of other ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation and sustainable forest products.