Forest managers face a difficult challenge: the effects of today's decisions may only become visible decades from now. A new science-practice project is bridging that gap bringing cutting-edge forest simulations directly into the field, so practitioners can see the long-term consequences of their choices before making them.
Combining field exercises with dynamic computer modelling to build confidence in sustainable forestry
Forests are expected to do more than ever. They must supply timber, protect biodiversity, store carbon, and grow more resilient to climate change – all at the same time. For forest managers, integrating these competing objectives into a single strategy is demanding enough; doing so under deep uncertainty about the climate and economic conditions of coming decades makes it even harder.
Research has made real progress on forest management approaches that balance these goals. But translating scientific findings into practice has remained slow. Managers want faster, more direct access to the latest insights and they want to explore them together with their peers, not in isolation.
Training in the field, with real data
Over the past decade, researchers have established a network of forest training plots across Europe and beyond, known as marteloscopes. In each plot, every tree has been mapped and measured in detail. Using a companion app called “I+ Trainer”, foresters can carry out virtual management exercises on-site, simulating interventions and immediately seeing their quantified impact on stand structure, biodiversity value, carbon storage, and economic return.
These hands-on exercises have proven effective to foster dialogue among foresters and with other stakeholders in the forestry sector. But they have a significant limitation: the models are static. They can show the before-and-after of a single intervention, but cannot reveal how the forest will develop over time. In an era of uncertainty, this risks nudging managers toward strategies with quick, visible results at the expense of long-term resilience.
Adding a time dimension
Forest science has long modelled how forests change over decades. These simulations can incorporate knowledge of forest dynamics, integrate climate scenarios, and project the likely effects of different management strategies over periods of 50 years or more. Until now, however, these tools have remained confined to academic research, too complex and inaccessible for use in the field.
This project changes that. A simulation model capable of tracking individual trees over time in mixed-age forest stands will be connected to the existing “I+ Trainer” software. For the first time, foresters conducting field exercises will be able to look beyond the immediate impact of an intervention and explore how their decisions play out across half a century.
Built with practitioners, for practitioners
The project led by Benoit Courbaud of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), together with Andreas Schuck and Sergey Zudin of the European Forest Institute (EFI), builds on the existing marteloscope network and its community of trainers. Rather than delivering a finished tool from the top down, the team will develop the approach through a co-construction process: testing and refining the method with trainers and stakeholders, and drawing on the practical knowledge of foresters themselves to identify the most promising silvicultural strategies.
This kind of science-practice dialogue is at the heart of the project. When researchers and practitioners reflect together on real forest situations, understanding deepens on both sides and the path toward more resilient, multifunctional forests becomes clearer.
