📋 Tender Overview
Start Date: 01/01/2023
End Date: 31/12/2027
Total Eligible Budget: 4,977,415 €
EU Contribution: 2,986,447 €
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The changing climate makes it necessary to reform the prevalent economic model of forest management and to modify the species, spatial, and age composition of forest stands to ensure their stability, to promote sustainable forestry, and to create conditions that allow forest stands to provide indispensable ecosystem services. The changes in temperatures and precipitation predicted to occur in Europe will change the moisture available in soil and, consequently, the growth and health of forest stands. For forest management, the greatest threat is long-lasting intensive drought, which has a primary damaging effect followed by secondary damage, particularly from under-bark insects. The extremely dry years 2003 and 2015 resulted in a major weakening of spruce forest stands, accompanied by a significant increase in bark beetle populations, particularly in areas with monocultures of even-aged spruce forest stands. An area of around 22 600 ha in the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, in Central Bohemia (Czechia), targeted by the project is endangered by increasing bark beetle populations because Norway spruce is present on 74.3% of the territory. Climate change combined with other harmful abiotic and biotic factors is therefore causing, and will continue to cause, forest stand atrophy and dieback. The most appropriate solution identified is a shift to close-to-nature management, using the principles of small-scale clearcutting, shelterbelt, and selection management principles. The aim is to achieve a structural balance, by means of alternating trees or tree groupings and mixing pre-dominant, dominant, and co-dominant trees, differentiated in regard to thickness and age. Atrophying even-aged monocultures also exist throughout Europe and furthermore, adapting forests to climate change does not constitute a one-time intervention; it will be a long-term transformation process. For that reason, the project will pay close attention to the transfer of outcomes.
