Press "Enter" to skip to content

Tag: climate change

How forest owners can guarantee an income in times of uncertainty 

How forest owners can guarantee an income in times of uncertainty 

Published September 14, 2023 by Sara Uzquiano

What I learned about the challenges for German forests and their owners, about future-oriented management and collaboration between forest science and practice when exploring the Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg county with my EFI Bonn team 

It is only a few months since I joined EFI, but of course, I have known the institution for a long time. And I must confess that I have always loved its catchy slogan: “Connecting Knowledge to action”. Thus, since I started working here, I have been looking forward to meeting and congratulating whoever would have created such an inspiring sentence. But recently I have found out that this slogan just simple and merely defines what we do at EFI, and I am going to tell you why.   

On Tuesday 22nd. August, we had our annual “Day out”, where EFI Bonn goes to the forest and discusses practical forest-related issues. We visited a forest located only one hour and a half Northeast of the city of Bonn, in the Northeastern part of Rhineland-Palatinate. It was not my first time visiting a German forest, but it was my first time seeing a German forest through the eyes of local practitioners.

Continue readingHow forest owners can guarantee an income in times of uncertainty 
Leave a Comment
Einen Tag Förster*in sein im Bonner KottenforstMarteloscope exercise

Einen Tag Förster*in sein im Bonner Kottenforst

Published September 12, 2023 by Gesche Schifferdecker

Wer interessiert am Klima- und Umweltschutz ist und mehr über die Rolle des Waldes im Klimawandel erfahren möchte, sollte an einer unserer drei „Marteloskop“-Übungen im Bonner Kottenforst teilnehmen.

Diese “Marteloskop“-Übungen (kurzes Info-Video zu Marteloskopen hier) bieten die einmalige Gelegenheit, selbst in die Welt der Förster*innen einzutauchen und Waldmanagement im Klimawandel zu erleben – und zu diskutieren, wie man den Wald sowohl nachhaltig nutzen als auch schützen kann.

Im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts „Martelkom“ lädt European Forest Institute in das Marteloskop im Bonner Kottenforst zum Austausch mit Förster:innen direkt vor Ort ein. Dafür haben wir drei Termine für unterschiedliche Zielgruppen gefunden:

Am 16. September üben wir mit Wald- und Klimaschutzinteressierte Bürger*innen von 10-14:30Uhr.

Am 23. September laden wir junge Klimaaktivist*innen um 10-14:30Uhr ein.

Am 6. Oktober möchten wir die Übung gemeinsam mit zukünftigen Lehrer*innen ebenfalls um 10-14:30Uhr durchführen.

Wo? Jägerhäuschen im Kottenforst, bei Röttgen (53125 Bonn)

Wir sind gespannt auf Ihre/Eure Perspektive! Da Plätze begrenzt sind bitte unbedingt anmelden unter hannah.ertelt(at)efi.int

Continue readingEinen Tag Förster*in sein im Bonner Kottenforst
Leave a Comment
Why Integrative Forest Management requires integrative solutionsDiscussions in the forest

Why Integrative Forest Management requires integrative solutions

Published September 7, 2023 by Silvester Boonen

In times of climate change and related global challenges, forests are both under threat and considered important allies to mitigate climate change. Demand for our forests is accordingly high, so we ask ourselves: Could Integrative Forest Management – a management method that integrates several forest ecosystem services – serve as one of the solutions? And if yes – how can we make all stakeholders concerned with forests part of this solution? What role does effective communication play in this? With the webinar “Integrative Forest Management requires integrative solutions” on 4th July organized by the Integrate Network, and hosted by the current Integrate chair, Michel Leytem (Luxembourg), we aimed at a solution-oriented discussion on tested methods and best practice approaches for overcoming silos and integrating the wide range of interests in forest ecosystems. Our panelists were Dr. Susanne Winter (WWF), Teresa Baiges (Centre de la Propietat Forestal, Catalonia), Sabrina Dietz (FACE), and Giovanni Santopuoli (Unimol). The panel was moderated by Jakob Derks (WUR, Landmax).

Continue readingWhy Integrative Forest Management requires integrative solutions
Leave a Comment
Community of practice: an inclusive Good Governance System in the Mediterranean area

Community of practice: an inclusive Good Governance System in the Mediterranean area

Published September 4, 2023 by ResAlliance

Communities of practice (CoP) are fundamental tools to build resilience and increase knowledge sharing: this is how the ResAlliance project intends to use this potential.…

Continue readingCommunity of practice: an inclusive Good Governance System in the Mediterranean area
Leave a Comment
Take a walk in the Saxon forest…

Take a walk in the Saxon forest…

Published August 29, 2023 by Cornelius Oertel

…and discover forest soil test experiments!

In the Eisenstraßenmoor in Saxony, Germany, forest visitors now have access to information about peatlands and can discover one of the H2020 HoliSoils project sites. “The Eisenstraßenmoor used to be a drained bog. This means that centuries ago, the foresters simply drained the water and directed it away from the bog to make the area suitable for tree growth and timber production” , says Clemens Weiser, head of the local forest enterprise. “This deteriorated the condition of the bog, causing the entire peat body to decay. As a result, significant CO2 emissions occurred due to the dryness, similar to how a compost pile at home decomposes.” Clemens and HoliSoils partner Cornelius Oertel and his team from The Thünen Institute for Forest Ecosystems want to reverse this process as part of their activities in the project .

Continue readingTake a walk in the Saxon forest…
Leave a Comment
Managing your forest or not? Find out with the INFORMA Forest Management PlatformComparison of managed and unmanaged forest patches in the Woods of Brabant, in Belgium

Managing your forest or not? Find out with the INFORMA Forest Management Platform

Published March 21, 2023 by Jonas Simons

By Jonas Simons and Bart Muys (KU Leuven)

Imagine you are responsible for a large, forested area in Europe. Will you manage it, or let nature run its course? If you decide to manage your forest, what would be the consequences? Would it store more carbon? Would it use its resources more efficiently, or produce more wood? What about biodiversity conservation? Would the unmanaged choice have more bird species? Another factor to consider is the frequency of disturbance events, such as fires and windstorms, which is increasing due to climate change. Since you will want to keep the resilience of your forest high, which management option would contribute better to this goal?

Unfortunately, current research answers these questions ambiguously. The relationships between the management of forests, provisioning of several ecosystem services and resilience to disturbances remain rather unclear. In addition, several of the ecosystem services we expect from forests have trade-offs between each other. The bottom line is: before deciding what to do with your forest, you should know your viable management options (including the decision to not manage), and which consequences different implementation options have on how your forest functions. In Work Package 2 (WP2) of INFORMA, led by KU Leuven, we will investigate this knowledge gap. To do so, we are developing the INFORMA Forest Management Platform: a new, large database that is specifically designed to answer management-related questions for European forests. 

Continue readingManaging your forest or not? Find out with the INFORMA Forest Management Platform
Leave a Comment
Healthy trees translate to healthy citizens

Healthy trees translate to healthy citizens

Published February 21, 2023 by Gesche Schifferdecker

New FORWARDS project will provide crucial information on European forests’ vulnerability to climate change

Climate change has already had a deleterious impact on forests ecosystems and silviculture in various parts of the world. But healthy trees translate to healthy citizens: everyone benefits from forests’ clean air, safe food and water, and recreational space.

With a total budget of €14m funded by the European Commission’s HorizonEurope (plus additional funding by Switzerland and the UK) and more than 19 partners (incl. European Forest Institute) involved, the FORWARDS project (ForestWard Observatory to Secure Resilience of European Forests) will provide timely and detailed information on European forests’ vulnerability to climate change. The project will also deliver science-based knowledge to guide management using the principles of climate-smart forestry, ecosystem restoration, and biodiversity conservation. With its activities, FORWARDS aims at supporting European forests and society to transform, adapt, and mitigate climate-induced changes.

Continue readingHealthy trees translate to healthy citizens
Leave a Comment
<strong>Experiencing an excursion through the eyes of a forest modeler</strong> 

Experiencing an excursion through the eyes of a forest modeler 

Published February 7, 2023 by Marc Grünig

For the RESONATE project, my task aims at developing high resolution future forest trajectories and disturbance maps for the European continent. Continental scale modelling always comes along with trade-offs regarding the detailed processes. Taking this into account, we follow a bottom-up approach, where we use detailed information from local process-based forest simulations to train deep neural networks. For this, we collected forest simulations under different climate scenarios from hundreds of locations across Europe, covering large gradients of environmental and climatic conditions. By combining simulations from different regions, we can explore the relationship between forest dynamics and climate signals using deep neural networks. These neural networks learn to represent forest dynamics depending on environmental and climate conditions, allowing us to upscale the forest dynamics to continental scale. We believe that with this approach we will make a step towards better capturing local scale dynamics at the macroscale.  

But guess what, forest modeling means we spend most of the time in front of our screen, working on code and data that eventually allow a glimpse into the future of forest ecosystems. Although I spend a lot of my leisure time hiking, cycling and sometimes ski touring in the mountains, professionally I spend very little time in the field. Therefore, I was really happy to join the excursion as part of a conference we organized in Berchtesgaden some months ago. The occasion to go to the field with colleagues who spend a lot of time there and visit the system that I am currently modelling is very special and of course informative. And for me, coming from a macroecology background, it is also particularly important to see gradients in the mountain landscape and discuss their impact on vegetation processes as well as disturbances.

Continue reading<strong>Experiencing an excursion through the eyes of a forest modeler</strong> 
Leave a Comment