Strengthening European forest monitoring: a call for synergies among ground-based inventorying and monitoring networks

On 7 of May 2025, Plants, People, Planet published an Opinion article on ‘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.

This Opinion article 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.

Read the 2025 COST Association press release.