Project Details
Projekt
Reforestation of forests and orchards after disturbances – A transformative action plan balancing socioeconomic and biodiversity needs
Applicant
Professor Dr. Matthias Noll
Subject Area
Forestry
Ecology of Land Use
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Ecology of Land Use
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569680329
The BIOREFOREST project aims to initiate a societal transformation towards optimising reforestation strategies for forests and orchards that take biodiversity into account as a key factor in the planning process. The objectives are to: i) assess the impacts of different reforestation strategies on biodiversity and economic outcomes across spatial and temporal scales; ii) assess the interaction between disturbance and reforestation successes; and iii) develop site-specific approaches that: a) balance site-specific ecological and economic needs, and b) represent a tailor-made reforestation strategy for stakeholders. BIOREFOREST will focus on European forest sites affected by natural disturbances and reforested as monospecific stands (including orchards) or mixed-species stands, compared to naturally regenerated sites with minimal management intervention. The project will combine state-of-the-art data collection, modelling, AI and participatory approaches to guide reforestation decisions. Reforestation sites and their spatial and temporal development will be identified using satellite data from the last 50 years. Policy makers, forest and orchard owners of identified reforested sites will be engaged in a collaborative activity network. Landowners’ engagement will allow BIOREFOREST to collect site-specific information via customized surveys. At the sites, systematic sampling of soil, leaves and deadwood is carried out. Citizen science tools will be used to monitor plant biodiversity, thereby empowering participants, increasing environmental self-efficacy and promoting behavioral change. Multitrophic biodiversity will be analyzed using metagenomics for each site, and the data will be functionally annotated. Remote sensing information, metadata from selected forest and orchard sites, and biodiversity data will be used to model ecosystem services and carbon sequestration using the LPJ-GUESS model in relation to climate change and potential threats to trees and soil quality. Finally, all data will be used to train, validate, and test eXplainable AI (XAI) models to assess site-specific reforestation strategies that best balance biodiversity goals and economic needs. The XAI models trained with all features will extract important markers to serve as decision support systems. These markers will include taxonomic and functional indicators to monitor current and future reforestation efforts on biodiversity and to predict the impact of reforestation strategies on biodiversity. The project's outputs will provide a decision-support system for balancing biodiversity and economic outcomes of reforestation. In addition, forest and orchard owners, land managers and policy makers will be involved throughout the project through workshops, training, and self-sampling campaigns. This will ensure that reforestation strategies are practical, widely adopted, and in line with the goals of the EU Forest Strategy, the Nature Restoration Law, and the Soil Mission.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland
Partner Organisation
Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency; Agencia Estatal de Investigación; Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF); Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca (MUR); Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF); The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS)
