Advancing Forest Intelligence: New FORWARDS Calls Strengthen Climate-Resilient Monitoring Across Europe
FORWARDS, a Horizon Europe project, is developing the https://forwards-project.eu/the-forestward-observatory/ForestWard Observatory – a cutting-edge, pan-European tool to monitor and evaluate the impacts of climate change on forests. This initiative will support informed, practical forest management decisions across Europe. Currently, the project is launching 2 calls:
Call 1 “G-03-2025: Pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites: Linking stand-level information and remote sensing” invites projects that connect long-term forest monitoring sites with advanced remote sensing technologies, aiming to unlock the full potential of existing networks such as ICP Forests, ICOS, or LTER. While these sites already offer valuable data, many are not yet optimized to assess climate change impacts. This call seeks to bridge that gap by integrating hyperspectral remote sensing, ideally from aircraft platforms, with robust on-site ground-truthing.
Call 2 “G-04-2025: Pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites: Providing temporally resolved ecosystem-level information on the effects of climatic drivers on forest structure and function in near real-time” seeks to enhance the capabilities of existing forest monitoring sites – particularly, but not limited to, networks like ICP Forests, ICOS, and LTER – to better assess the impacts of climate and extreme weather events on trees and forest ecosystems. While these sites already provide essential long-term data, there is a pressing need to expand their potential to capture short-term, climate-driven changes. The call specifically invites projects that apply nowcasting approaches, such as monitoring tree water deficit with point dendrometers during drought events. By integrating these real-time stress indicators with existing long-term datasets, the goal is to create a more dynamic and responsive forest monitoring system. This combined approach will offer deeper insights into how forests respond to climatic extremes, enabling more effective adaptation strategies and contributing to the development of the ForestWard Observatory
Apply before 24 August and get a grant of max 145k for your pilot projects!
