New EU project MoniFun strives to enhance European forest monitoring

A new EU funded project MoniFun is building a database on Europe's forests. The aim is to compile comprehensive information on Europe's forests and their links to climate change, society and the condition of the environment. The four-year project, led by the Natural Resources Institute of Finland (Luke), involves 13 partners from 11 European countries.

MoniFun aims to establish the blueprint for a comprehensive European Forest Multifunctionality Monitoring System (EFMMS). The EFMMS deals with the challenges posed by climate change and environmental stressors on Europe's forests.

“The need for such an initiative has arisen due to lack of harmonized European-level information required by policymakers and other stakeholders regarding the multifaceted aspects of forests. These aspects encompass properties related to forest resources, and the connection of forests with society, climate and biodiversity to support progress towards climate action and reversing biodiversity loss”, says Luke’s Research Professor, Project Coordinator Lauri Mehtätalo.

The initiative will use a multi-actor approach to ensure the wide applicability of the monitoring system, addressing the information needs of various institutions and stakeholders. The project aims at mapping the essential information needs and responding to these using data with sufficient quality and the most suitable data sources, such as remote sensing, national forest inventories and other existing data sources.

Key outputs in MoniFun are tools that can efficiently combine these data sources using semi-automatic methods without a need to risk the confidentiality of the original data sets. To address methodological challenges, MoniFun will develop harmonized solutions, maximizing the system's applicability in Europe.