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Category: Marteloscopes

Who are the women shaping the Integrate Network?

Who are the women shaping the Integrate Network?

Published March 24, 2026 by Rahel Könen

Women’s voices are not optional in forest management – they are essential for its future. By bringing women’s expertise into integrative forest management, we can unlock knowledge that better balances biodiversity, production, and social needs. When women are at the table, forest governance becomes more legitimate and democratic – reflecting the realities of all those who depend on and care for forests. 

On March 8, when the Integrate Network celebrated International Women’s Day, it featured the perspectives of women who actively shape the direction of its network through their work and leadership:

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Five Students, One Mission: To Set-up a New Belgian Marteloscope

Five Students, One Mission: To Set-up a New Belgian Marteloscope

Published March 17, 2026 by Rahel Könen

For one semester, Simon Musin, Antoine Van Lede, Samuel Konsdorff, Louis Uytterhaegen and Tom Schriewer shared a mission: To figure out how to create a new marteloscope close to their Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech faculty in Belgium. 

But how does one set-up a 1-hectare forested, monitored, and mapped site, used to train forest managers, owners or students on the intersection of biodiversity conservation and timber production? 

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SimInForest Project – building an innovative approach to link marteloscope exercises to simulation models

SimInForest Project – building an innovative approach to link marteloscope exercises to simulation models

Published February 18, 2026 by amschuck
SimInForest Project – building an innovative approach to link marteloscope exercises to simulation models
The marteloscope Sailershausen 2.

Written by Andreas Schuck, Senior Researcher at the European Forest Institute

For forest managers, it is quite challenging to integrate multiple forest management objectives and increase forest resilience considering our uncertain climatic and socioeconomic future. Marteloscopes, field plots in which every tree has been mapped and measured, are a great tool for silviculture training addressing these management challenges. With the help of a software that runs on mobile devices (“I+” software package) we can perform virtual silviculture interventions directly in Marteloscopes and retrieve the results immediately. This way, training participants can observe the impact of their interventions on various ecosystem services and discuss their results and applied silvicultural practices. This training approach has become very popular in the past ten years and a large network of marteloscope sites has emerged across Europe and beyond.

However, so far quantitative analyses of marteloscope exercise results are limited to comparisons of the forest stand before and immediately after a single silvicultural intervention. Currently, potential stand evolution after a virtual thinning and potential management prescriptions are mainly discussed based on the expertise of marteloscope trainers and the participants but lack quantitative support. Here, SimInForest “Combining field exercises and simulations on marteloscopes to develop integrative and sustainable silviculture approaches” comes into play.

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Establishing a Network of Marteloscopes in Western Ukraine

Establishing a Network of Marteloscopes in Western Ukraine

Published February 10, 2026 by amschuck

Guest article by Vasyl Lavnyy and Peter Spathelf, originally written in German and published here.

One of the central tasks of forest management is deciding when, where, and what kinds of interventions are needed in a forest. But what factors should influence those decisions? 

Participants of forestry workshops often bring very different goals, motivations, and levels of experience to this question. Because of that, it is important to ask how silvicultural interventions affect various ecosystem services and the biological diversity of the forest. Marteloscopes are particularly useful for this purpose, because they allow users to make virtual interventions and immediately discuss the outcomes while standing in the forest. 

Marteloscopes aren’t just valuable for people with a solid forestry background – they are also excellent tools for students and other groups interested in forests. 

Over the last 20 years, Prof. Vasyl Lavnyy, Professor at the Ukrainian National Forestry University, has led many field trips through Ukrainian primary forests for foreign researchers and foresters from Germany, Switzerland, and France.

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What does EFI do? A Visiting Student’s Perspective from Taiwan 

What does EFI do? A Visiting Student’s Perspective from Taiwan 

Published February 4, 2026 by Gabriela Rueda

Blogpost by Li Xin Yue

Quite often, there is a gap between forest policies developed on the national level, and the actual challenges practitioners face on the ground. This is an issue that we are also facing in Taiwan. To learn more about how other countries are dealing with the persistent disconnect between national forest policy and local realities, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education decided to fund me with an internship that allows me to travel across Europe and Asia to learn about different forest governance models.  And here I was, a master’s student at National Taiwan University, coming to Germany and visiting European Forest Institute.  

From EFI I wanted to learn how long-term scientific research can be effectively connected with policy processes and on-the-ground practice. And my exchange with the EFI researchers offered insights not only for my reporting, but also beyond the European context. 

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Forests Dialogues – Our guideline to genuine exchange and the path toward it

Forests Dialogues – Our guideline to genuine exchange and the path toward it

Published October 29, 2025 by Katharina Freund

How can genuine dialogue about forests succeed?

This question stood at the beginning of our project and became the starting point for our new guide “Forest Dialogues”, developed at the European Forest Institute (EFI) together with colleagues from the Forest Research Institute Baden-Württemberg (FVA).

The debate about the future of our forests is no longer purely technical. Climate change, nature conservation, timber production, and recreation – all play a part in forest management in Germany. Yet both citizens and forestry professionals often feel that their concerns are not fully understood. Foresters, as representatives of forest management, are also mediators between their profession and a society that increasingly demands participation and wants its views to be heard.

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New features on interactive map reveal forest complexity: European-wide tool launches to help navigate geospatial data from the Integrate Network Database New features on interactive map reveal forest complexity: European-wide tool launches to help navigate geospatial data from the Integrate Network Database 

New features on interactive map reveal forest complexity: European-wide tool launches to help navigate geospatial data from the Integrate Network Database 

Published October 6, 2025 by Louisa Bouri-Saouter

Marteloscopes are a key tool of the Integrate Network Multi-Donor-Trust-Fund. Since the start of Integrate + in 2013, the network’s forerunner project*, this didactic training…

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Developing a scientific survey – an experience reportSurvey example

Developing a scientific survey – an experience report

Published November 6, 2024 by Hannah Ertelt

What comes to your mind when you think of forest science? Maybe scientists monitoring biodiversity in the forest? Or researchers projecting future scenarios? But what about social science research around forests? In our Martelkom project, we are exploring societal perceptions of forest management and the interactions between foresters and the public. To do this, we decided to conduct a nationwide survey in Germany. This cannot be too complex – right? Or can it? 

You might think that creating a survey is quick and easy: just draft some questions on the topics you want to study. Yet, in our studies, we have been told to never underestimate surveys and their complexity as a data collection tool. So, when we were tasked to develop a survey on societal perceptions of forest management, we were eager to dive in. Now that the survey is sent out, we’re still surprised by how much time it took – from crafting the right questions to identifying our target group, refining wording, and selecting the best response types. But let’s break it down step by step. 

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