Towards an Integrated Consistent European LULUCF Monitoring and Policy Pathway Assessment Framework.

Project: EU project

Project Details

Description

Precise information on the current status of forests is required to forecast forest management effects which allows informed policy decisions. To inform and support the implementation of these policy objectives, PathFinder will develop and demonstrate an innovative integrated forest monitoring and pathway assessment system. This system, for the first time, will allow a consistent EU greenhouse gas reporting of the LULUCF sector, but, at the same time combine such monitoring capability with advanced pathway assessment to help plan the essential policy and implementation steps towards achieving the policy targets. The continuous monitoring of forests facilitates controlling of target achievement and possibly adjustment of pathways. PathFinder goes beyond the state-of-art by the most efficient, combined use of field and remotely sensed data for high-resolution mapping and precisely estimating forest attributes. The cooperation of the largest forest monitoring organizations operating in the EU, i.e., national forest inventories (NFIs) and the network installed under ICP Forests, provides a rich data base of harmonized ground truth information which will be complemented by an innovative field survey of consistently assessed field monitoring sites. Advanced measurement devices will provide an audio-visual digital twin including genetic properties of the consistently monitored forest for maximum transparency and interoperability of new data. The analysis of combined databases will improve our understanding of fluxes among C pools. The precise forest information of the monitoring system will feed into a new scenario framework that forecasts future forest scenarios and outcomes of forest management alternatives. The scenarios facilitate trade-off analysis of forest ES and are potential alleys in the pathway assessment. The pathway assessment is a co-creation activity in which novel monitoring and scenario studies are integrated with EU-level stakeholder visions and knowledge
AcronymPathFinder
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/09/2231/08/26

Collaborative partners

  • VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
  • Norwegian Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research (lead)
  • Austrian Federal Office and Research Centre for Forests (BFW)
  • University of Helsinki
  • Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  • European Institute of Planted Forests (IEFC)
  • Research Institute for Nature and Forest (EV-INBO)
  • Croatian Forest Research Institute
  • Treemetrics Limited
  • University of Freiburg
  • University of Göttingen
  • Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
  • Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute
  • Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke)
  • CICERO Center for International Climate Research
  • Forest Management Institute (FMI)
  • European Landowners' Organization (ELO)
  • Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL)
  • National Institute of Geographical and Forest Information (IGN)
  • Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)
  • University of Bristol
  • Slovenian Forestry Institute
  • Joint Research Centre (JRC), Brussels

Funding category

  • Horizon Europe

Keywords

  • HORIZON-CL5-2021-D1-01-09
  • databases