On 8 May 2025, Plants, People, Planet journal, managed by the internationally recognised publisher Wiley, published a Perspective Paper ‘Building synergies among ground-based forest inventorying and monitoring networks to meet scientific, political, and societal needs.’
The article provides insights into the current efforts that the ‘Joint effects of Climate Extremes and Atmospheric deposition on European Forests’ (CLEANFOREST) COST Action is developing to provide a comprehensive understanding of the status of European forests under global change pressures and to establish standardised protocols and methods for measurements and promote data sharing.
European forests play a crucial role in climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, though they are continuously adapting to rapid and continuous variations in environmental conditions. Ensuring their health and resilience requires timely detection of changes in forest status, and functioning, and provided ecosystem services. However, accurate predictions of their future ecological, economic, and social contributions depend on a well-coordinated approach that brings together ground-based forest inventory and monitoring networks, community science, and key stakeholders.
This new paper published by Dr Rossella Guerrieri and colleagues from the CLEANFOREST COST Action core group highlights the urgent need for stronger synergies among these players. The authors advocate for a new era of forest monitoring and inventorying, where networks collaborate and coordinate their efforts to systematically track and assess the state and long-term changes in European forests. This can be achieved with the creation of an ‘alliance’ of forest monitoring and inventorying programs, which should fall under the auspices of international political bodies. The alliance could serve as the pan-European research infrastructure that centralizes discussion on protocols for data collection and data harmonization, priority needs for current and future monitoring, and accessibility to the data from relevant end users, thus strengthening the European forest monitoring system. The alliance is timely and essential to support the proposed EU Forest Monitoring Law, as well as other relevant European policy targets.
“Given the current momentum in European forest policy, now is the time to foster stronger synergies among Europe’s leading research infrastructures. Enhancing collaboration and integration among established national inventorying and long-term monitoring networks, as well as bottom-up monitoring initiatives will improve our understanding of forest responses under global change, supporting climate mitigation and evidence-based policymaking.”
Dr Rossella Guerrieri, Chair of CLEANFOREST
This Perspective paper is the result of debate during and after the panel discussion on ‘Building a common vision on forest monitoring amid global change: challenges and opportunities’ during the first annual meeting of the CLEANFOREST COST Action in Thessaloniki in 2023.
Plants, People, Planet is a multi-disciplinary Open Access journal, owned by the New Phytologist Foundation and published by Wiley. The journal publishes outstanding plant-based research in its broadest sense and celebrates everything new, innovative, and exciting in plant-focused research that is relevant to society and people’s daily lives. The New Phytologist Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of plant science.
Authors of the paper: Rossella Guerrieri, Elena Vanguelova, Silvana Munzi, Mariangela Fotelli, Cristina Branquinho, Marco Ferretti, Mirco Migliavacca, Yann Salmon, Sami Ullah, Rocío Alonso, Jaroslav Ďurkovič, Nikolaos Fyllas, Katerina Machacova, Ivika Ostonen, Dimitrios Sarris, Arne Verstraeten
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.70002
About CLEANFOREST
Launched in 2022, CLEANFOREST Is a multidisciplinary network of European scientists and forest experts that is developing a comprehensive understanding of the effects of key global change drivers on forest ecosystems. The network has gathered over 401 participants from 38 COST Member countries.
View the Action webpage
View the network website
Read the recent article about CLEANFOREST published on the International Day of Forests