Europe’s bioeconomy is expected to foster economic growth and to tackle significant societal challenges with less harmful environmental effects through innovative, sustainable and inclusive use of European forest resources. Increasing demand for biomass and other ecosystem goods and services calls for changes in forest-related policies at different levels and across different sectors. Accordingly, the recent Forest Strategy provides clear signals towards the need for harmonised information for mapping and assessing the dynamic state of forest ecosystems and their services. Building upon scientific advances in COST E4, 39, 43, USEWOOD, FORSYS, ORCHESTRA; the networks ENFIN, EFFIS, SOSIN; the FP7 EUFODOS, S2BIOM, INTEGRAL, SIMWOOD, FIRE PARADOX the project DIABOLO aims to: i) strengthen the methodological framework towards more accurate, harmonised and timely forest information, e.g. on growing stock and stock changes, biomass, carbon, NWFP; enable the analysis of sustainable biomass supply derived from multipurpose and multisource national forest inventories; and facilitate near real-time forest disturbance monitoring, e.g. on forest fires, storm, drought, insect outbreaks; ii) support EU policy processes, international reporting obligations, forest administration and forest planning entities with new methodologies and EU-wide consistent forest information; iii) make innovative use of existing field-collected data and EC space-based applications of EO and satellite positioning systems with reference to INSPIRE and GEOSS, and global monitoring systems such as REDD+, FLEGT and UNFF. To deliver high impact, beyond state-of-the-art work within the ecological and socio-economic diversity in Europe, the trans-disciplinary DIABOLO involves experts in quantitative modelling, policy science and NFIs, from 26 European countries, committed to provide new methodologies and information for various end-uses, including EFDAC (FISE) at JRC, GLOBIOM at IIASA and work at FAO/UNECE.

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.