Connecting Forest Management Realities to Climate Modelling
By Marie Haase and Rina Tsubaki.
Science has been and will continue to shape how Europe’s forests are managed today and in the future. For example, climate modelling can help inform decisions, but the challenge lies in how these types of research can reflect the real priorities that forest managers have and experience on the ground. INFORMA works to bridge this gap by integrating stakeholder perspectives directly into its research, and this is why it’s important to have direct engagement with a broad range of people involved in forest research, management, and practice.
On 21 October 2025, Sebastiaan Luyssaert from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Marie Haase from the European Forest Institute hosted a webinar, “From Models to Management: Bridging Science and Practice in European Forests”, to address exactly this. The session brought together 25 people online, including forest researchers, managers, and practitioners from across Europe, to discuss how climate models can help support effective management decisions. Using the LMDzOR climate model, Sebastiaan presented his work on modelling and spoke about which forest management approaches would benefit goals such as timber production, climate adaptation, or soil carbon storage on a European scale.
Forest managers often balance multiple objectives when making decisions in forests, and with the progression of climate change, the need for robust management choices is becoming more urgent. When working with a natural system, humans cannot control everything. Some processes in forests can be managed, such as soil carbon storage, leaf area, soil temperature, and tree diameter, whereas others, like vegetation stress, remain outside our control. There are far more trade-offs than synergies in forest management. For example, soil carbon storage does not align well with timber harvesting.
The webinar highlighted the importance of developing models that can capture these complexities and help identify the most resilient forest management approaches for the future. This process requires collaboration across science, policy, and practice. The bottom-line message is that science alone cannot address the issue without the involvement of people who understand and know the realities.
If you are working with forest management in practice, policy, or research in Europe and have interests and concerns around the future of European forests, we invite you to take part in our short survey, Forest Management Objectives for Future Resilient Forests in Europe Survey.
We are specifically looking for input from those with experience and expertise in forest management practices, policy, or research across Europe (except the central region). However, contributions from elsewhere in Europe are also very welcome.
By participating, you will receive updates on the project’s outcomes and an invitation to join the end-of-project workshop, where findings and recommendations will be shared.
This comes with our hope of making our research as relevant as possible to the real-life work and challenges of forest management in Europe.