MONIMED

Monitoring Mediterranean climate-smart forestry practices for climate resilience and ecosystem service provision

Creaf leader

The aim of MONIMED is to take a vision of adaptive management one step beyond the current state, incorporating new management strategies closer to nature and including new parameters linked to multifunctional management, biodiversity conservation, mitigation capacity and the climate resilience of the system.

The project encompasses the monitoring of ongoing pilots with conventional management (9 and 4 years of monitoring) with new adjacent pilots incorporating Clima-Smart Forestry practices: (1) integrative multifunctional management and (2) management oriented towards the preparation of natural development . New parameters will be evaluated in all practices, indicators of the forest's ability to host biodiversity, mitigation capacity and its climate resilience.

Rural abandonment in recent decades, together with climate change, make Euro-Mediterranean forest areas highly vulnerable to climate change impacts and this situation threats the provision of ecosystem services. In the past, forest management in Mediterranean forests was characterized by intensity, system simplification and single-product oriented. Current forests are the result of the confluence of these trends: management abandonment on highly vulnerable structures to drought, pests and wildfires.

Accions

In the last decade, several demonstrative projects have assessed the effects of forest management on the adaptive capacity of Mediterranean forests. This assessment has specially focused on monitoring different indicator parameters of forest growth, tree vitality and fire risk prevention after conventional management with different degrees of thinning intensity and underground clearing. MONIMED project aims to take this vision of adaptive management a step further, incorporating new closer-to-nature management strategies and including new parameters linked to multifunctional management, biodiversity conservation, mitigation capacity and climate resilience of the system. The project encompasses the monitoring of ongoing pilots with conventional management (9 and 4 years of monitoring) with new adjacent pilots incorporating Climate-Smart Forestry practices: (1) integrative multifunctional management and (2) management oriented to natural development preparation. New parameters will be assessed in all practices, indicators of the forest's capacity to host biodiversity, mitigation capacity and its climatic resilience.