Call for Grants: Pilots of Long-term Climate Impact Forest Monitoring Sites (G-05-2024) in Europe

Deadline: 31-Oct-24
The European Forest Institute has launched a Call for Grants G-05-2024: Pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites: Linking stand-level information and remote sensing.

Objectives and Outcomes 

• FORWARDS is a Horizon Europe project that will prototype the ForestWard Observatory, a pan-European monitoring and evaluation tool that will help demonstrate climate change’s impact on forests, guiding decision-making for practical forest management. As part of its activities, FORWARDS will establish a network of pilot monitoring plots/sites to assess the long-term impact of climate change on forest ecosystems. These pilot plots/sites must be linked to existing forest monitoring networks and provide spatial representativeness, as explained below.
• The call for “pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites – (a) Linking stand-level information and remote sensing” is closely linked to work package 2 of FORWARDS, which is implementing drone- and aircraft-based proximate sensing to study tree and forest structure and function. The significant advantage of this approach is the high spatial resolution of the overhead imagery that can be directly linked to treelevel, ground-based assessments on the one hand and satellite products on the other. Tree and forest functional traits can be captured on the tree and stand scale with multi- and hyperspectral sensors, and detailed individual tree-matched ground truthing can be performed. Thus, a direct relationship between ground measurements and comparable information from satellite-based remote sensing (RS) (though with higher spatial resolution) makes such high-resolution proximate sensing a central technique for linking classical ground-based monitoring with RS.
• The primary aim of this call for grants is to support activities engaging in linking ground-based information to remotely sensed data. Results and data from these measurements will contribute to the Europe-wide ForestWard Observatory. Thus, the funded projects must allow for integrating the data and the results generated into the broader scope of WP2 of FORWARDS as described above.

Funding Information

• Proposals can request a contribution of max. 145,000 euro, which will allow to link ground and remotely sensed information at several sites.
• A maximum of two projects will be funded under this call.
• Projects are expected to start in April 2025 and last a maximum of 18 months.
• The activities must be completed at the latest by October 2026.

Supported Projects and Activities

• Successful grant applications (and supported projects) must include activities that strengthen the linkage of ground-based monitoring information with satellite imagery for European forest monitoring.
• The projects supported by these grants are encouraged to follow the methods detailed below to provide information with novel and improved measurements and sensors to enable the validation and scaling of forest functional variables from the leaf to the tree-, plot- and landscape-level to link plot-level information and remote sensing products
• Data and results from the supported activities must be available for open access at the latest upon project completion, and feed into the ForestWard Observatory that is being developed by the FORWARDS project.
• The projects are expected to carry out aircraft-based imaging spectroscopy flights and related physiology and biochemistry ground-truthing.
• The project should cover:
  • Imaging spectroscopy flights of at least two sites that qualify for supersites in different biogeographical regions with different forest types are recommended to be carried out in 2025 during mid to late summer (peak greenness) via aircraft
  • Physiology and biochemistry ground-truthing, consisting of measurement and sampling of foliar material simultaneously (i.e., on the same day or close in time under similar conditions) with imaging flights for at least the supersites. Leaf samples are intended for pigment analysis, ideally including Xanthophylls. At the same time, measurements could include chlorophyll fluorescence, gas exchange, leaf water potential and stationary continuous or contact measurements of reflectance spectra or indices, which will provide additional value to the aircraft-based information.

Eligibility Criteria

• Grant applications can be submitted by one legal entity or a consortium of legal entities.
• Applicants must, by the deadline for submission of the Application, meet the following criteria to be eligible for the grant:
  • Applicant is a legal entity (legal person)
    • If the application is submitted by a consortium (grouping of legal persons represented by a coordinator), this criterion applies to all the participants This call is not open for applications from natural persons
  • Applicant eligible for funding under the European Union Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program
    • If the application is submitted by a consortium, this criterion applies to all the participants

Ineligible

• Furthermore, the following legal entities (legal persons) will not be eligible for funding:
  • Beneficiary or associated partner of the FORWARDS project under the Grant Agreement No. 101084481
  • Entities subject European Union restrictive measures
  • Israeli entities due to activities in the territories occupied by Israel (European Commission Guidelines No 2013/C 205/05)
  • Public interest trusts established under the Hungarian Act IX of 2021 or any entity maintained by such a public interest trust (Council Implementing Decision 2022/2506)

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