FORES

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.