Ireland is one of the few countries in Europe that experienced almost complete deforestation in recent history with just over 1% forest cover remaining at the beginning of the 1900s. Since then, an impressive effort has been made by the State of Ireland and other stakeholders to increase forest cover – but the Irish plan...
It sounds like a paradise: Being the largest protected river basin in Europe, the transboundary Mura-Drava-Danube is about to become the first five-country (Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia) biosphere reserve in the world under the auspices of UNESCO. The reserve covers an area of about 8,300 km2, which is comparable to more than one million soccer fields. Being extremely rich in biodiversity, it harbours high ecological and...
If you ask stakeholders all over Europe “What should we do with our old-growth forests?”, you can expect eyebrows to be raised. Discussions start with questions continuing to circle at policy level and in academia on how old-growth forest should be defined. Similarly, we face unresolved issues on how to implement the targets of the...
How should we best manage our forests? This is the guiding question behind the virtual communication workshop series the secretariat of the European Integrate Network is initiating. Being aware that there is no single answer to this question, in our first training on “Building a Narrative”, we engaged with 19 stakeholders from forest policy, management,...
Researchers at the European Forest Institute have been investigating the Kottenforst in Bonn, an urban forest, for some time. This allowed them to compare how visitor numbers have changed in the Corona lockdown compared to before. Result: There are definitely more people on the road. Why is that? And what does this mean for the...
On March 30, the European Network Integrate hosted the webinar “Policy challenges of integrating biodiversity conservation in forest management – the way forward”, gathering over 100 attendees. The webinar brought together forest policy experts from the French, German, Italian and Swiss governments to compare country perspectives and lessons learned on how to advance forest biodiversity conservation...
The European Integrate Network promotes cross-sectoral learning and cooperation across country borders on successful approaches for enhancing biodiversity conservation as an integral part of forest management practices. It is also our aim to to act as an open, pro-active interface between research, policy, administrations and practice implementation. Finally, we provide stakeholders a platform for on-site...
On the 22nd of February 2021, the first meeting of the Spanish partners in the Integrate Network was held. It was a great success in terms of participation, with the attendance of 16 people from different organizations such as the national and regional public administration, private companies, universities and research centres. As a first get-together,...
In the webinar on 7 December, jointly organized by the SINCERE project and the Integrate Network, a diverse expert panel discussed implications for the provision of forest ecosystem services (FES) in the light of new EU Policies: the Green Deal and the Biodiversity Strategy to 2030 as well as the eagerly anticipated EU Forest Strategy....
The conference on “How to balance forestry and biodiversity conservation – a view across Europe”, held on November 9th-11th, 2020 as an online webinar, was named after the title of the upcoming oForest book publication, which compiles expertise of integrated forest management from over 150 authors. Read more about the presentations and discussions of the first day here.
