Researchers bring science into the heart of the forest – forest management developed together with local communities
How can we manage forests so that they preserve biodiversity, store carbon, and at the same time secure rural livelihoods? This complex question is being approached in a new way in the FORbEST project, where researchers, forest owners, policymakers, and citizens work together.
The project aims to identify and test forest management practices that optimise both biodiversity and carbon storage while supporting rural livelihoods and climate change adaptation.
Funded by the EU’s Horizon programme, the project combines high technology, citizen science, and scientific expertise in six Living Labs across Europe and Asia. At the heart of the project are forests and their users, who together develop and test new forest management strategies that consider climate change, biodiversity, and social and economic constraints.
Living Labs are interactive collaboration platforms where different stakeholders actively participate in research design, data collection, and scenario testing.
The Living Labs are in ecologically and socially diverse areas in Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Italy, and Thailand, covering five biogeographic regions and one tropical forest area.
Forests must be studied where they grow, and in collaboration with local actors. Living Labs make this possible, making the research more impactful, more practical and more representative of the views and experiences of multiple stakeholders,” says project lead, Academy Research Fellow Roger Norum from the University of Oulu.
The project will also develop a participatory, game-based tool that illustrates the complex choices involved in forest management and encourages dialogue between stakeholders. This supports the building of a shared understanding and better decision-making.
“Our hope is that the research innovations from FORbEST will better map critically important forests in Europe and facilitate more efficient data collection, providing near real-time data that will ultimately improve how decision-making is done in forest management,” Norum emphasizes.
Scientific data will be collected using, among other methods, eDNA sampling and advanced biodiversity and carbon monitoring techniques. The data will be fed into a modelling platform that simulates forest development and balances ecological, social, and economic objectives. “This way, we can assess, for example, how different management practices affect forests’ ability to sequester carbon or maintain species diversity under changing climate conditions,” Norum explains.
“This will enable land management organisations to better protect our most vulnerable forests and sustainably use our most resilient forests, devising new management strategies that will successfully meet biodiversity and carbon objectives,” he adds.
Concrete outcomes of the project will include a set of scalable roadmaps and recommendations for best practices that support evidence-based decision-making. At the same time, researchers will explore ways to assess the economic value of forests and develop incentives that support the provision of ecosystem services.
The FORbEST project has received €5,967,519 in funding from the EU Horizon programme. The consortium includes 18 organisations from across Europe and Asia, among them the Universities of Bologna, Milan, and Tuscia (Italy), the Centre for Ecological Research (Hungary), the Natural Resources Institute Finland, Chiang Mai University (Thailand), as well as several research institutes, foundations, and public authorities.