Enhancing Forest Insights: Advanced Tools for CSF Assessment
As a forest owner or policymaker, you want your forests to be more resilient in the years to come. But how can you determine the best management options?
One of the aims of the FORWARDS project is to provide guidance in these matters by quantifying and evaluating the effect of climate smart forestry (CSF) management practices and restoration activities. To this end, researchers from the University of Molise created two user-friendly web-applications that allow the user to upload inventory data from different forest stands and evaluate for themselves what the “smartness” of different management strategies has been, using a set of CSF indicators.
The models LPJ-GUESS and EFISCEN-Space are used to make projections of the effects that management interventions and climate scenarios will have on European forests in the future. Both models require spatially explicit forest inventory data to do this, but unfortunately these are not always available and up to date. To tackle the first of these issues, researchers from the European Forest Institute and Wageningen Environmental Research designed a data assimilation routine to synthesise spatially explicit forest data to bridge information gaps. To deal with the second issue, colleagues at Lund University devised a method to update forest data, using the remote sensing-based data from forest disturbances and harvest dataset produced within the ForestPaths project. The developed tools were demonstrated along case-studies in Finland, Italy, and the Netherlands.
DISCLAIMER: This deliverable has not yet been officially approved by the European Commission and should be considered a draft.
