Description

Climate change, intensive forest management, and other environmental stressors (e.g. air pollution) are creating increasing pressure on Europe’s forest ecosystems’ ability to simultaneously provide multiple ecosystem functions—i.e., multifunctionality1 —including the biodiversity they harbour and the many ecosystem services (ES) they provide. The relationship between forest resilience to climate change, forest management, protection and restoration, and diverse forest ES are only partially understood, due to the limited availability of data at desired spatial and temporal scales, and the incoherent and scattered information across diverse sources. The lack of harmonised monitoring of these relationships and interactions across Europe hinders the consolidation of comprehensive knowledge that is needed for successful planning, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based policies, as well as mitigation and adaptation measures at the European and national levels. MoniFun is a Horizon Europe project that will co-create a blueprint for a system for monitoring the state and multifunctionality of Europe’s forests, which consolidates currently fragmented information (qualitative and quantitative) into a comprehensive, interoperable information system that integrates existing platforms, and is applicable to the needs of diverse stakeholders, policies, certification schemes, and society.