The“REINFORCE project: INtegrated landscape management for REsilient mountain FORests under global changes”
The REINFORCE project develops and analyzes possible forest management strategies to increase the resilience of European mountain forest landscapes in the face of imminent global changes. Using advanced modelling and simulation systems, the future dynamics of the forest landscape in different study areas in the Alpine regions will be analyzed. Based on these results, alternative and resilience-based forest management plans will then be evaluated. The innovative approach of REINFORCE is to combine dynamic landscape modeling, functional diversity - i.e. a concept of diversity based on the ecological role of each species instead of only on their abundance - and ecological network analysis. This approach allows us to determine where to most efficiently intervene within the forest landscape to maximize resilience to sudden disturbance and climate change. The project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 891671 awarded to Marco Mina (MSCA-IF-2019) and coordinated by Eurac Research.