SUPERB pursues the overall goal to create a lasting enabling environment for transformative change towards large-scale forest and forest landscape restoration, which empowers decision makers to take just and informed decisions for restoration of biodiversity, ecosystem services and carbon sequestration in a manner that minimises region specific trade-offs and maximises synergies between ecosystem services. SUPERB develops and synthesises a multidisciplinary, practical, and scientific restoration knowledge basis and makes it publicly available. In 12 large-scale demonstrators across Europe, we will showcase best practices responding to key forest restoration and adaptation challenges on some hundreds of hectares per demo and with the potential for immediate upscaling to over one million hectares in 10-15 years. For large scale restoration to be successful, many actors from different sectors and disciplines must behave synergistically and in a mutually reinforcing way. We will speed up transformative change and further upscaling through innovative stakeholder involvement across scales to ensure the favorability and uptake of the proposed approaches. A comprehensive multi-language online Forest Ecosystem Restoration Gateway will guide stakeholders to find answers to their restoration questions, advise them on how to deal with barriers and enablers and provide access to easily applicable and comprehensible tools and materials that support restoration, e.g., best practices for forest restoration or the development of scalability plans, a tree species selection application, an innovative funding guide, and much more. The Gateway will also host a restoration Marketplace, where market agents, e.g. potential funders and landowners, can agree on bids for restoration projects. SUPERB will boost and measure its impact through its extensive and systematically enlarged stakeholder communities and networks, to ensure the relevance of the project outputs and their positive uptake.

<< Objectives >>The forest sector in Europe is a major economic playground and home to 13 million employees. It is characterised by strong traditional settings. Its education needs fundamental change on sectoral, organisational, individual levels. The FOREE objective is to develop blended-learning Train-the-Trainers & MOOC courses to transform forestry adult education and training to a flexible hybrid system through the complementary use of digital learning concepts, tools and platforms in broad applications.<< Implementation >>3 forestry education centers, one university (pedagogy), and one wood-cluster will implement the following: Based on preceding needs analyses, WP2 assesses required skills & technology readiness via online survey and 6 focus group workshops, WP3 develops the design and content for a ToT and MOOC to instruct teachers/trainers on how to create and facilitate online adult education. WP4 implements pilot courses and evaluates by workshops and feedback forms. WP5 disseminates and networks broadly.<< Results >>Results are (1) Status & critical success factors of digital teaching in forestry education & recommendations, (2) Handbook & Toolkit, (3) Design of online platform, (4) Concrete course pilots. All results are reusable, transferable and will be shared (open access) with key target groups (forestry trainers, teachers) who are integral part of all activities. Courses will be Quality-labelled. Results are promoted via Associated partners to policy/decision makers from local to transnational level.

FORADVISE will develop a European network of forest advisory organisations, actors, and networks, to support the modernisation of the forestry sector, and advance towards EU and national policy targets. It will speed up knowledge flows, increase the competences of forest advisors beyond traditional areas of advice, and develop pathways towards a future Forest Knowledge and Innovation System (FOKIS) in Europe. Its ultimate goal is to advance towards more resilient, multifunctional, and productive forests in Europe. To achieve this, FORADVISE, creates a EU forest advisory network on forestry, and animates an iterative knowledge sharing process, combining national and international action, and implements knowledge transfer pilots to adapt advisory practices to new contexts. It develops training modules, contextualising well proven approaches and materials, delivering them through a MOOC. It develops a Cost Benefit Analysis toolkit to increase advisors’ capacities to assess social and economic implications. Lessons learned are the basis for a systematic engagement of policy makers, to create feasible and desirable pathways for the development of forest advisory systems in Europe, and to integrate forest advisors into the Member States’ AKIS. All these activities are supported by an analysis of the Forest Knowledge and Innovation Systems, and the needs and preferences of its different actors. Project activities are supported with dedicated communication and dissemination activities, and exploited through tailored impact pathways, including a digital knowledge platform. As the project advances, a smooth transition towards a self-sustained network is embedded into project activities. A dedicate task identifies working modalities and business models for the long-term continuation of the network, building upon the experience of the FOREXT initiative. FORADVISE consortium gathers Europe’s main actors in forestry advice.

Global environmental and climate changes compromise forest resources in different ways, intensities and at various levels. Drought related losses in growth performance, the increase in intensity and frequency of wild fires and storms, and of biological risks are just a few of the most perceptible effects across the forests in Europe as well worldwide. Global change weakens the efficiency of forest carbon sequestration capacity and thus forestry sector ability to mitigate climate changes in the medium to long-term perspective. An innovative adaptive and integrative forest management plays a key role in driving forests to face the environmental changes and to meet both maintaining high forest carbon sequestration potential and guaranteeing economic efficient and more ecological sound forest operations. ETN Skill-For.Action integrates the fundamental research in forest ecology and applied science of forest engineering. This integration is crucial and innovative to comprehensibly understand carbon dynamics in forests in terms of feedback between carbon sequestrations and release. Overarching objective of ETN Skill-For.Action is to provide high-level training and education in adaptive and integrative forest management under global changes to a new generation of early stage researchers for a successful career in the forest-sector and natural resource management. The education follows an innovative, interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach by a specific and unique combination of applied research and training activities delivered by academic and non-academic partners to strengthen complementary soft skills. ETN Skill-For.Action will support each ESR to successfully implement their individual project through a well defined supervising strategy by merging the educational experience of the academic supervisors with the practical knowledge of the non-academic supervisors.