The MED region includes more than 25 million hectares of forests and about 50 million hectares of other wooded lands. Climatic and socio-economic changes in this region could have serious consequences for forests, potentially resulting in the loss of ecosystem services and causing a wide range of economic, social, and environmental issues. The low competitiveness of the forest-wood supply chain in European Mediterranean (EUMED) countries is currently amplified by the missing or limited access of forest managers and companies to current and new digital technologies which appear to be out of date in certain key areas or fail to address some of the most pressing difficulties that the industry is expected to be confronting in the next decades. This rationale calls for the urgent implementation of a multi-actor approach to digitalization, starting from recognizing stakeholders’ needs and subsequently defining joint actions. To this end DigiMedFor's overall goal is to transform the technological landscape of the Mediterranean forest-wood supply chain by increasing its competitiveness, thus allowing the different stakeholders to better manage and supply multiple forest ecosystem services, including the traceability of wood origin from forests to end-users. In line with the EU forest strategy and the EU digital strategy, DigiMedFor will employ advanced and innovative digital solutions to improve the monitoring and management of forest resources along the supply chain from their origin up to the wood industry, optimising both the sustainability of wood production and traceability and delivery of ecosystem services. DigiMedFor will address the synergetic use of geo-spatial, AI, and modelling technologies, combining them with ICT.

INT-ACT focuses on intangible cultural heritage – i.e., practices and aspects of culture that shape our understanding of ourselves, our sense of belonging, and our relationships to each other and to the tangible cultural environment – as a means of bridging the past, present and future to provide novel approaches to transforming society and addressing societal challenges facing humanity at these times of epochal changes. INT-ACT does this by: 1) developing effective methods for extracting, structuring, and presenting the Emotional, Experiential and Environmental (3E) dimensions as formalised knowledge, 2) developing transdisciplinary methods of inquiry for capturing, compiling, and preserving the 3E dimensions contained in human narratives, 3) proposing and testing interaction techniques, narrative methods and audio-visual media choices for immersive eXtended Reality (XR) environments that present the 3E dimensions of intangible cultural heritage in the context of their associated tangible cultural heritage sites, and 4) providing solutions that address societal challenges by utilising these immersive XR environments. INT-ACT uses four selected tangible cultural heritage sites to develop its methods of extracting their associated intangible cultural heritage knowledge and human narratives, which are used for creating the content of four small-scale XR-based demonstrators. These demonstrators are then used in four case studies dealing with cultural, social and technological changes facing citizens and cultural heritage, namely: cultural tourism, ageing societies, disappearing communities, and immigration and multiculturalism. Each of these case studies targets a different societal challenge of importance and relevance to the multidisciplinary consortium of INT-ACT.