European Forest Institute
Type of work: Project and Program Management
Relevent Country: Switzerland
Last Date: 31-10-2024
The European Forest Institute has announced a Call for Grants G-06-2024: Pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites: Providing temporally resolved ecosystem-level information on the effects of climatic drivers on forest structure and function in near real-time.
Objectives and Outcomes
FORWARDS is a Horizon Europe project that will prototype the ForestWard Observatory, a pan-European monitoring and evaluation tool that will help demonstrate climate change’s impact on forests, guiding decision-making for practical forest management. As part of its activities, FORWARDS will establish a network of pilot monitoring plots/sites to assess the long-term impact of climate change on forest ecosystems. These pilot plots/sites need to be linked to existing forest monitoring networks and provide spatial representativeness, as explained in detail below.
The call for pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites is closely linked to work package 2 of FORWARDS, which is implementing novel monitoring techniques at existing forest monitoring sites. High-resolution dendrometer measurements are central and can capture complex signals integrating tree stem irreversible growth and reversible radial fluctuations due to stem water release and refill. Sub-daily measurements of stem diameter variations from dendrometers will provide valuable in situ metrics on the long-term physiological response of trees to changing climate in terms of growth and water status. Together with measurements of soil moisture availability and meteorological parameters, impacts of extreme heat and drought events and effects of other disturbances on growth and water relations and growth phenology will be captured. Combined with modelling approaches, regional scale nowcasting tools for stress and stress impact are being established. Forest structural features assessed by LIDAR or classical forest mensuration are central to understanding the forest C stock and the C sequestration potential. Such information must also be linked to satellite products that allow spatial extrapolation.
One of the major aims of FORWARDS is to develop a stress now-casting network. The primary aim of this call for grantsis to support activities engaging in additional measurements and providing long-term data on forest functioning and forest disturbance impacts to understand better the impact of climate change on various time scales. Results and data from these measurements will contribute to the Europe-wide ForestWard Observatory. Thus, the funded projects must allow for the integration of the data and the results generated into the broader scope of WP2 of FORWARDS as described above.
Funding Information
Eligibility Criteria
Ineligible