Workflow
Project work and specific activities are broken down into six work packages (WPs):
- WP 1 – Project management, coordination and monitoring
- WP 2 – Forest sustainability indicators
- WP 3 – Pathways to forest sustainability
- WP 4 – Forest ecosystem modelling and outcomes
- WP 5 – Sustainable operating spaces and policy implications
- WP 6 – Communication and transnational dissemination
Scientific sections:
Working Packs
WP 1 – Project management, coordination and monitoring
Leader: UMIL
WP1 deals with project reporting and communication between the project coordinator, WP leaders and project partners to ensure smooth progress of project activities, transparent exchange of data and information of reporting material, including exchanges and updates with ForestValue2 Research Programme and Call Office. WP1 establish an Internal Advisory Board ensuring regular correspondence, within and outside the project, the delivery of project outcomes by set deadlines, and the effectiveness, quality and impact of project activities and outcomes. WP1 also has the task to prepare and implement plans for monitoring risks, data policy, IPR, gender representation and ethics issues.
Tasks:
- Administrative, legal and financial management
- Coordination of daily activities and communication
- Monitoring activities, maximisation of the impact
- Ensuring strategic actions and promoting the engagement of end-users
- Monitoring risks, data policy, IPR, gender representation and ethics issues
- Management of data and other information material
WP 2 – Forest sustainability indicators
Leader: UNITBV
The core-of-project operational WPs (WP2-5) mostly concern applied research activities heading to delineating the sustainable operating spaces for European forests. Forest-related sustainability is addressed by considering environmental, social and economic aspects intertwined with forest ecosystems, forest management and planning, including forest value-chain, and forest policy and governance. The main task of WP2 is to perform an inventory of driver, pressure, state, impact, and response indicators (DPSIR framework) of forest-related sustainability.
Tasks:
- Identification and selection of forest sustainability indicators
- Building an overall matrix of forest sustainability indicators
WP 3 – Pathways to forest sustainability
Leader: UNIZAR
The main task for WP3 is to collect and store all relevant data and information about case study areas (CSAs), such as those concerning the biophysics of forest ecosystems, and management and planning implementation. Moreover, based on indicators’ mapping (WP2), WP3 has the aim of building socio-economic scenarios throughout an in-depth process of co-design and co-creation of related narratives hand-in-hand with stakeholders in CSAs. Several participatory meetings with relevant actors in forestry and associated sectors local scale in CSAs will be organised. WP3 also collect reliable and suitable climate-related data and parameters (multiscale process) to assess historical and future trends in climate patterns in CSAs, as well as information about natural disturbances, which will be then associated with resilience and adaptation indicators for assessing the health, resilience and adaptation of forest ecosystems. One of the main objectives of WP3 is to align social-economic scenarios and climate scenarios to obtain a full description of the interactions between impact and driver indicators, and possible futures of forest development and resulting sustainability in CSAs. In WP3, socio-economic and climate scenarios will be finally translated into forest management alternatives through an expert-based approach.
Tasks:
- Case study areas: selection, management and data collection
- Local social and economic pathways for forest sustainability
- Climate conditions and alignment with socio-economic scenarios
- Translation of scenarios into forest management and planning
WP 4 – Forest ecosystem modelling and outcomes
Leader: UFR
The role of WP4 is to initialise and run a modelling exercise. Based on information elaborated in previous WPs, we implement a process-based, spatially explicit model (iLand) to simulate the provision of forest ecosystem services (FES; timber provision, biodiversity conservation, regulation of climate (mitigation, including substitution effects), regulation of mass flow, tourism and recreation, water provision (recharge)) in CSAs according to forest management alternatives (see WP3). Simulation outcomes concerning the state and future development of forests and FES in CSAs will be obtained. On top of FES indicators, changes in additional social and economic parameters not directly resulting from the modelling exercise will be included. Positive or negative changes in social and economic parameters, as well as in future FES provision compared to the baseline (WP2), will describe, respectively, positive or negative impacts of climate and social and economic drivers (WP3) on forest-related sustainability. This way, WP4 build a list of impact indicators for forest-related sustainability.
Tasks:
- Model parameterisation and initialisation
- Simulation of forest ecosystem services, including model development
- Assessing implications for impact indicators
WP 5 – Sustainable operating spaces and policy implications
Leader: NMBU
WP5 will define sustainable operating spaces for forests in CSAs and draw response options to inform policy and governance frameworks on how to improve forest-related sustainability in Europe. Sustainable operating spaces will be defined by considering the range of variability of impact indicators (WP4) between lower (negative) and upper (positive) thresholds. Response options are designed consistently with ongoing and short-term policies at both European and global scales, including, for example, the EU Forest Strategy to 2030 and other amendments triggered by the European Green Deal, UN Agenda 2030 and SDGs targets for forests.
Tasks:
- Quantifying sustainable operating spaces
- Definition of potential policy implications (sustainable response options)
WP 6 – Communication and transnational dissemination
Leader: UMIL
WP6 take care of building a communication, dissemination and exploitation strategy and carries out communication and dissemination activities. Planned dissemination activities maximise the impact and resonance of project contents, outcomes and policy implications at multiple scales, even beyond national boundaries in Europe (i.e. transnational), and reach out to multiple target audiences, e.g. general public, policy makers, administrators, technicians, and scientists. Dissemination activities are: scientific publications, policy briefs, organisation of workshops, participation in conferences and other events, including those organised by ForestValue2 Research Programme. Various communication channels and tools will be used, including newspapers and social media.
Tasks:
- Developing a project communication and dissemination strategy
- Dissemination activities of project knowledge and results
- Communication and dissemination tools
DPSIR indicators
In the SOSFOR project, we use a robust set of 54 indicators to assess the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of forests in marginal areas of Europe at the landscape scale. These indicators are structured within the DPSIR framework (Figure on the right), a widely adopted model that effectively describes the links between human activities, environmental changes, and societal responses. As one of the most comprehensive approaches, this framework allows to address the complexity of coupled human and natural systems by enabling the assessment of causal linkages between human activities and environmental change or health.
According to this framework, climate change and socio-economic developments act as Driving forces that exert Pressures on forest ecosystems, leading to changes in their State — for example, in forest structure, health, or function. These changes can reduce the capacity of forests to provide ecosystem services, resulting in Impacts on both environmental and human well-being. Such impacts may trigger societal Responses (e.g., policy measures or management interventions), which in turn feed back on the Driving forces, Pressures, or directly on the State or Impacts through adaptive or corrective action.
Why are DPSIR indicators important in SOSFOR?
The DPSIR indicators allow us to:
- Track how social (e.g. depopulation, land use conflicts), economic (e.g. market fluctuations, resource over- or under-exploitation, insufficient investment), and ecological processes (e.g. habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, land use change, climate change, forest vulnerability) shape forest sustainability at the landscape scale.
- Identify the most critical sustainability challenges in marginal forested landscapes in Europe.
- Define Sustainable Operating Spaces (SOS) for forest management to develop strategies that balance environmental integrity, economic viability, and social equity in investigated landscape.
Selecting the right indicators for forest sustainability
The forest sustainability DPSIR indicators in SOSFOR were identified through a systematic review of scientific and policy literature and selected through expert consultation involving multiple European institutions. Relevant indicators for sustainability assessment were chosen based on their ability to capture the environmental, social, and economic processes that shape forest sustainability at the landscape scale.
The final set comprised:
- Must-have indicators, essential for forest sustainability assessments
- Secondary indicators, complementary for deeper analysis, where data availability allows
For more details, explore our Project Results section to access the full matrix of indicators (M12 deliverable).
Scenarios and modelling tools
[ Available soon ]
Sustainable Operating Spaces (SOS)
[ Available soon ]