Deliverable 3.1. Monitoring protocol

MONIMED project seeks to advance adaptive forest management by integrating closer-to-nature management strategies and incorporating novel parameters related to multifunctional management, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration potential, and climate resilience. The project encompasses the long-term monitoring of ongoing pilot sites under conventional management (9 and 4 years of monitoring) alongside newly established adjacent pilots implementing Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) practices: (1) integrative multifunctional management and (2) management geared towards fostering natural development processes. All management approaches will be assessed using newly defined indicators reflecting the forest’s capacity to support biodiversity, its carbon sequestration potential, and its resilience to climatic stressors. Monitoring of the ongoing and new CSF pilots is the central objective of the MONIMED project, with the aim of making the monitoring data collected available to the FORWARDS project, as part of the future ForestWard Observatory. This is the framework of this Deliverable 3.1 Monitoring protocol, an in deep description of the monitoring tasks and network developed to assess and compare the evolution of the different practices in comparison with their initial conditions, with the control plots and with the experiences in other areas of the project. The ultimate aim of the monitoring is to evaluate the efficiency of the practices to improve the adaptation capacity of forest to face climate change threatens, through the analysis of the effects of the practices on growth and forest structure (diameter distribution, basal area, tree cover, understorey cover); the potential forest capacity to host biodiversity (using the Potential Biodiversity Index, IBP); the ecosystem services provision (water status, protection against wildfires, health status); and mitigation capacity (carbon sink capacity, carbon storage in forest compartments (soil, biomass, dead wood and litter)).