Call for Grants: Pilots of Long-term Climate impact Forest Monitoring Sites (G-06-2024) in Europe

Deadline: 31-Oct-24

The European Forest Institute has announced a Call for Grants G-06-2024: Pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites: Providing temporally resolved ecosystem-level information on the effects of climatic drivers on forest structure and function in near real-time.

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 need to be linked to existing forest monitoring networks and provide spatial representativeness, as explained in detail below.
• The call for pilots of long-term climate impact forest monitoring sites is closely linked to work package 2 of FORWARDS, which is implementing novel monitoring techniques at existing forest monitoring sites. High-resolution dendrometer measurements are central and can capture complex signals integrating tree stem irreversible growth and reversible radial fluctuations due to stem water release and refill. Sub-daily measurements of stem diameter variations from dendrometers will provide valuable in situ metrics on the long-term physiological response of trees to changing climate in terms of growth and water status. Together with measurements of soil moisture availability and meteorological parameters, impacts of extreme heat and drought events and effects of other disturbances on growth and water relations and growth phenology will be captured. Combined with modelling approaches, regional scale nowcasting tools for stress and stress impact are being established. Forest structural features assessed by LIDAR or classical forest mensuration are central to understanding the forest C stock and the C sequestration potential. Such information must also be linked to satellite products that allow spatial extrapolation.
• One of the major aims of FORWARDS is to develop a stress now-casting network. The primary aim of this call for grantsis to support activities engaging in additional measurements and providing long-term data on forest functioning and forest disturbance impacts to understand better the impact of climate change on various time scales. Results and data from these measurements will contribute to the Europe-wide ForestWard Observatory. Thus, the funded projects must allow for the integration of 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 establishing infrastructure on existing monitoring plots where additional information on the impact of climate change on forests can be gained.
• Up to 5 projects will be awarded by 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, although with assured continuation of the nowcasting approaches for a minimum of three years.

Supported Projects and Activities 

• Successful grant applications (and supported projects) must provide temporally resolved ecosystem-level information on the effects of climatic drivers on forest structure and function in near real-time.
• The aim of the call follows the concept of ” linking methods”, as described in detail by Zweifel et al. 20236 where a handful of standardised methods for meteorological as well as soil- and tree-related parameters provide a data framework along which site-specific measurements can be scaled.
• The projects supported by these grants are encouraged to follow the methods detailed below to provide information with novel and improved measurements and sensors on forest disturbances and status related to climate change based on complementary ground-based sensors for Stress nowcasting (soil and tree ecophysiological data) together with information on the carbon sequestration potential of forests (Carbon storage and stand structural information).
• Data and results from the supported activities must be available for open access in a close-to-real time frame for stress nowcasting and feed into the ForestWard Observatory developed by the FORWARDS project.
• Stress nowcasting might provide novel information on the impacts of climate change on forest functioning only after some time. Proposals must, therefore, include a plan (incl. funding) that elaborates how the measurements will be continued for a minimum of three years beyond the project’s duration.

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
• Applications not fulfilling the above stated eligibility criteria will be rejected.

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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