Description

FORWARDS is a Horizon Europe project that will prototype the ForestWard Observatory, a pan-European monitoring and evaluation tool that will help demonstrate the impact of climate change on forests and guide decision-making for practical forest management. This call aims to set up pilots for long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites across Europe. Current long-term forest monitoring networks provide important information on the impact of climate change on forests. Still, most monitoring networks are not particularly focused on assessing climate change impacts. With this call, the aim is thus to increase the potential of existing forest monitoring sites – especially but
not inclusively ICP Forests, ICOS or LTER sites (i.e., sites which already provide a basic set of monitoring data) – to assess the impact of climate and climatic extremes on trees and forests. Projects should apply
nowcasting approaches (such as measurements of tree water deficit with point dendrometers in response to drought) and link existing long-term assessments with the new measurements.