Towards a Europe alliance for forest monitoring

Forests cover over four billion hectares of Earth’s land surface of which 227 million hectares are in the European continent. This represents an immense resource in terms of ecologic, economic, social and cultural values.

There are high expectations from policymakers and society about the role of forests in contributing to climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation goals, while also supporting a sustainable forest-based bioeconomy. 

However, forests are facing unprecedented pressures from climate change, climate extremes and disturbances, pollution and land use change intensification.  

This means that there is an increasing uncertainty about the ability of forests to maintain important ecosystem services and mitigate climate change. It also calls into question the envisaged role of forests to achieve policy targets within the Paris Climate Agreement and the European Union climate-neutrality targets. 

Ensuring the health and resilience of forests requires the timely detection of changes in their status, functioning and ecosystem services. However, accurate predictions of their future ecological, economic, and social contributions depend on a well-coordinated approach that brings together ground-based forest inventory and monitoring networks, community science, and key stakeholders. 

In a new paper published in the journal Plants, People, Planet, the authors advocate for a new era of forest monitoring and inventorying, where networks collaborate and coordinate their efforts to systematically track and assess the state and long-term changes in European forests. 

“The paper has been a product of our ongoing EU COST action CLEANFOREST work ,” said Dr Elena Vanguelova, senior biogeochemist at Forest Research and a co-chair of CLEANFOREST. 

“EU COST action offers significant benefits for networking and research by boosting the collaboration of experts, funding networking activities, enhancing the impact of research, and encouraging mobility, career development and global research cooperation.”

Ahead of the proposed EU Forest Monitoring Law, as well as other relevant European policy targets, colleagues from the CLEANFOREST COST Action core group recommend an alliance of forest monitoring and inventorying programs, which fall under the protection of international political bodies.

This alliance could serve as the pan-European research infrastructure that centralises discussion on protocols for data collection and data harmonisation, priority needs for current and future monitoring, and accessibility of the data for relevant end users.

Given the current momentum in European forest policy, now is the time to foster stronger synergies among Europe’s leading research and monitoring infrastructures,” said Dr Rossella Guerrieri, Chair of CLEANFOREST.

“Enhancing collaboration and integration among established national inventorying and long-term monitoring networks, as well as bottom-up monitoring initiatives will improve our understanding of forest responses under global change, supporting climate mitigation and evidence-based policymaking.” 

Rossella Guerrieri et al. Building synergies among ground-based forest inventorying and monitoring networks to meet scientific, political and societal needs, Plants, People, Planet DOI: 10.1002/ppp3.70002