Deliverable 3.2. Evaluation of the performance of the practices

Mediterranean forests, shaped by past intensive and simplified management, now face heightened vulnerability due to rural abandonment and climate change. These legacy of forest structures increase exposure to drought, pests, and wildfire, while ecosystem service provision is at risk. Demonstration projects over recent decades have evaluated how silvicultural interventions influence forest growth, vitality, and fire risk mitigation. The MONIMED project advances adaptive management through climate-smart forestry, combining multifunctional objectives with closer-to-nature approaches. Pilot sites under conventional regimes (5–10 years of monitoring) are compared with new trials applying integrative multifunctional management and process-oriented strategies. Long-term assessment incorporates novel indicators addressing biodiversity support, carbon sequestration, and resilience to climatic pressures. This report describes the performance of the practices implemented within the MONIMED project. In first, the document summaries the effects of the two new Climate-Smart Forestry practices implemented in February 2025 in forest structure and characteristics: the close-to-Nature and the preparation to natural dynamics field trials. This evaluation is based on the comparison between the initial inventories developed on Autumn 2024, and the final inventories, developed on Autumn 2025. In second place, the document compares the implemented practices using new monitoring parameters linked to multifunctional management, biodiversity conservation, mitigation capacity and climate resilience of the system. Citation Pascual D, Pla E, Banqué M, Escobar A, Ballesteros X, Cortés A, Sánchez A (2025). Deliverable 3.2. Evaluation of the performance of the practices. MONIMED Project. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17865589