Project
EU24070 Monitoring the Multifunctionality of European forests (Monifun) - KB-50-003-031
Climate change, intensive forest management, and other environmental stressors (e.g. air pollution) are creating increasing pressure on Europe’s forest ecosystems’ ability to simultaneously provide multiple ecosystem functions—i.e. multifunctionality1—including the biodiversity they harbour and the many ecosystem services (ES) they provide. The relationship between forest resilience to climate change, forest management, protection and restoration, and diverse forest ES are only partially understood, due to the limited availability of data at desired spatial and temporal scales, and the incoherent and scattered information across diverse sources. The lack of harmonised monitoring of these relationships and interactions across Europe hinders the consolidation of comprehensive knowledge that is needed for successful planning, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based policies, as well as mitigation and adaptation measures at the European and national levels.
Europe’s forests are under pressure from climate change, but at the same time need to deliver more and more products and services. There is a monitoring law in development at the European Commission. Now every country monitors its own forest through national forest inventories, which are too slow, fragmented and diverse. Better information systems are needed. Monifun creates a system for monitoring the state and multifunctionality of Europe’s forests, which consolidates currently fragmented information (qualitative and quantitative) into an information system that integrates existing platforms, and is applicable to the needs of diverse stakeholders, and policies.
Activities: WR is involved in user needs assessment, in the design of the system incl. functionalities and indicators to be addressed. In addition, WR further develops a high resolution forest resource model based on very detailed data from these National forest Inventories. The model serves for gap filling and variables that address multifunctionality of the forests: biodiversity, bioeconomy, climate mitigation. We will 1) combine ground based1 forest inventories, modelling and remote sensing, 2) test and improve harmonised estimations, incl. maps of products and data and 3)communicate regularly with EU Commission and national stakeholders.