FORMASAM

Forest ecosystems and their products and services play an important role to achieve ambitious climate change mitigation but also have to adapt to climate change. Forest management schemes to support climate action have to be developed within their regional context but also have to be aligned with national or EU-level climate, forest and sustainability policies. Process-based forest models can assess the future provisioning of forest products by simulating different management options allowing to assess the production of wood products/woodfuels and forest resilience under climate change. FORMASAM develops future forest management scenarios that are consistent from the stand across the landscape to the continental level, allowing to explore climate mitigation and adaptation options for the European bioeconomy. These management scenarios will then be integrated into modeling studies. The first Task Group designs future forest management scenarios involving national experts from the United Nations Economic Commission of Europe (UNECE) Team of Specialists and the subsequent three TGs operationalize these scenarios for stand, landscape and continental scale models. FORMASAM brings together modellers and forest management experts from all over Europe including eastern and south-eastern European experts facing very specific management challenges. The combined expertise of FORMASAM enables developing forest management scenarios that focus on increasing forest resilience and contributing to the bioeconomy to provide input into future forest sector outlook studies such as the UNECE Forest Sector Outlook Study and also support the updating of the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC) of the EU and its member states for the Paris Agreement.

1. Bring together in four workshops over two years major European forest modelling groups that work at the stand, landscape and continental scale to synthesize how forest management is implemented in the models and foster knowledge transfer on how to upscale and integrate the different models. 2. Bring these modelers together during the two-year period with national and EU-level forest management experts to develop consistent future forest management scenarios dealing with adaptation and mitigation of climate change that can be interpreted by the different modellers at the respective scale of their model. 3. Use the results from these networking activities to provide a standard set of management scenarios as a basis for existing and future forest modelling activities and model protocols to facilitate multi-model comparisons and simulations for forest sector outlook studies such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s Forest Sector Outlook Study (UNECE/EFSOS) and also support the preparation of the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC) of the EU and its member states for the Paris Agreement.

- expertise and simulations with stand-scale model 4C, expertise temperate forest management - Setting up the SIBYLLA (which has not yet been part of the PROFOUND modelling activities, as opposed to the other stand-scale models participating of this networking activity) for the stand-scale simulations of TG3 based on the PROFOUND Database - Develop a first draft of the management scenarios at different scales and their implementation in model protocols