SUPERB has now successfully completed three years of project implementation and is well on track to have fundamental impact on the future of forest restoration in Europe. Currently, seven Work Packages (WPs) are still active, while WP3 on Practical knowledge has completed its work.
Most of the planned restoration actions and the initial success monitoring in our 12 large-scale demo areas have taken place, with some small delays here and there e.g. due to limited seedling availability, bad weather, disturbances, and very lengthy administrative processes. Initial lessons learnt have been drawn, further upscaling activities are being initiated, and upscaling route maps developed.
Impact-oriented stakeholder engagement continues along our sophisticated stakeholder engagement strategy. Transformative narratives guidelines have been developed and our monthly high-level forest restoration talks continue to draw the attention of a diverse and international group of researchers and stakeholders.
All planned efforts to collect (e.g. through questionnaires or national experts writing extensive national narratives) and synthesise practical forest restoration knowledge have been completed.
We have also concluded all data collection and analysis on sustainable financing. Beyond the scientific articles produced, we are extracting a set of lessons-learned for practice and policy makers. The Marketplace concept has also been pushed forward and adapted in collaboration with the Cluster sister project Merlin and Oppla to respect the fast development of similar platforms.
We completed the policy coherence analyses of relevant EU and national (demo countries) laws and/or strategies. Special focus was given to the Nature Restoration Regulation. To assess and provide support to particular restoration conflicts, interviews conducted in several demos, leading to the development of a typology of stakeholder conflicts and respective mitigation approaches. Social media and surveys are being used to explore issues and debates emerging around forest restoration while useful tools and methods are being compiled.
The Forest Restoration Knowledge Base has been further expanded through systematic reviews, learnings derived from soil studies in the demos and a curated selection of highly relevant external materials. Support to the demos for species and provenance selection and selection of best regeneration methods is continuing e.g. through a species support system (still under development):
https://seed4forest.vercel.app/(öffnet in neuem Fenster). Our sophisticated monitoring approach (chronosequence, acoustic, arthropod and vegetation sampling, terrestrial lidar scanning, airborne LiDAR and multispectral image sampling, eDNA analysis etc.) is progressing well, with the ultimate goal to develop guidelines for cost-efficient monitoring, reporting and verification. Forward projections of key restoration indicators for ecosystem service provision are almost complete and a manual was produced.
The Forest Restoration Gateway technical structure and design has been completed and coding is commencing. The Gateway will be called “Forest Knowledge Gateway: Forest Restoration and Integrative Management” (forest-knowledge.eu).
