Climate Smart Fagus sylvatica Forests (CSFagus4EST)

 

Funded by: European Forest Institute
Programme: G-04-2023: Establishing Climate-Smart Forestry and forest restoration pilots in Europe
Duration: 2024-2025 (18 months)
Budget: 139.000 EUR

 

Introduction

European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) is one of the keystone European tree species. However, it is expected that beech forests in Europe will be severely threatened by climate change, particularly in the southern part of the species distribution range. As a consequence of reduced forest resilience, a number of beech forests ecosystem services, including reduction of GHG emissions and effective carbon sequestration, can be disrupted. Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) can positively affect the health state and resilience of forests, enhancing the provision of all ecosystem services, particularly through sustainable forest management. However, uncertainty remains in terms of the application of different management strategies in beech forests, based on the CSF, and its contribution to adaptation and resilience of these forests to future climatic conditions.

 

Goal of the project

The overall goal of the project is to monitor the effect of different management practices (i.e. managed high forest, coppice forest, and unmanaged forest) on major ecosystems services in European beech forests, and to provide different types of data characterized as “CSF indicators”, complementing already existing FORWARDS sites. In addition, our intention is to propose innovative approaches in forest monitoring using Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

 

Overall concept

The project will be implemented within Pannonian bioregion (Serbia), across European beech stands (pilot plots) representative for the Balkan Peninsula, complementing the diversity of the forest ecosystems and biogeographic regions covered by the existing network, established within FORWARDS project.

The pilot plots will cover the principal interests on regional and European level considering the European beech forests, including:

  • climate change’s impact on the beech forests,
  • management approaches to enhance forest resilience,
  • best practices for increasing the potential of forests to sequestrate carbon.

 

Activities

The tree and stand-level measurements will be made on the pilot plots to:

  • evaluate the current state of differently managed beech forests by investigating forest productivity and health state, including species compositional, functional, and structural diversity,
  • quantify nutrients cycling in differently managed beech forest ecosystems and determine the annual return of elements and organic matter to the forest soils,
  • estimate the effect of forest management to the long-term carbon sink potential of beech forest ecosystems, throughout analyses of biomass and soil carbon stock,
  • monitor forest dynamics and forest stress responses of differently managed beech forests in near real-time, by establishing the wireless network of smart devices for automatic observations of trees’ physiological performances in the form of IoT.