Europe's forests are still standing, but many are losing the ability to recover
New eLTER policy brief calls for forest resilience to become a measurable objective of European policy, underpinned by long-term ecosystem observation
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Instruments and infrastructure for long-term observation at an eLTER site
view moreCredit: Evgeni Dimitrov/eLTER
A forest can look intact from the roadside and still have lost much of its capacity to bounce back. That gap between appearance and function is at the centre of a new policy brief published by eLTER, the European research infrastructure for long-term ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological research.
Across Europe, the rate at which forests are damaged by drought, storms, wildfire and insect outbreaks has more than doubled over the past three decades, and climate-driven damage already costs several billion euros a year. Compound events, where drought is followed by fire or by pest outbreaks, magnify those losses and slow recovery further.
The brief, Forests at Risk: Measuring and Building Resilience Against Extreme Climate Events, argues that resilience should become an explicit and measurable objective of European forest management and policy rather than an aspiration that is assessed only after damage has occurred.
“Summer 2026 has made the issue tangible: prolonged heat and drought have stressed forests across much of Europe, while by late August wildfires had burned more than 630,000 hectares in the EU, roughly twice the 20-year average for this point in the season. However, resilience is not simply whether a forest is still standing after a disturbance. The question is whether forests can maintain their functions, regenerate and adapt as conditions change. If we do not measure those processes, we cannot manage them,” says Giorgio Vacchiano of the University of Milan, author of the policy brief.
The stakes reach well past timber. Extreme events put biodiversity, rural livelihoods and cultural landscapes at risk, and raise the likelihood of floods and landslides. Europe's forests currently absorb around 360 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, but that sink is weakening as stands age, harvesting intensifies and disturbances grow more frequent. Without adaptation, the brief warns, European climate targets become harder to meet.
Looking beyond area and biomass
Forest monitoring and reporting still concentrate largely on how much forest there is and how much biomass it holds. Those figures matter, but they say little about whether a stand can resist a shock, recover afterwards or adjust to a changing climate.
The brief calls instead for a broader set of resilience indicators covering recovery capacity, regeneration, structural and functional diversity, landscape connectivity, and the capacity of species to adapt or shift their range.
Satellite observation can supply early-warning signals before decline becomes visible on the ground. A drop in photosynthetic activity, for instance, can indicate that recovery is slowing and that a stand is approaching a critical threshold. Monitoring also needs to capture compound disturbances, which are becoming more common yet remain poorly represented in conventional assessment systems.
Paired with long-term field observation, scenario-based models can combine three dimensions of risk at once: the climate hazard, the vulnerability of the forest and its adaptive capacity. That allows policymakers and forest managers to test "what-if" futures and target intervention where it is most needed.
Building resilience in practice
The brief sets out management approaches that can strengthen resilience, among them Closer-to-Nature and Climate-Smart Forestry, greater diversity of tree species and forest structures, restoration of hydrological function, and carefully planned assisted migration of suitable species and provenances. Biodiversity is central throughout: complementary species and functions help forests absorb uncertainty while continuing to store carbon, regulate water and support livelihoods.
Five directions for action are recommended:
- Mainstream climate-smart planning using resilience indicators and scenario modelling.
- Introduce quantitative resilience targets into national forest, climate, adaptation and nature restoration strategies.
- Invest in long-term observation and research infrastructures such as eLTER.
- Support biodiversity-based and closer-to-nature management through payments for ecosystem services and well-designed nature credits.
- Align forest management more closely with natural disturbance regimes to sustain resilience and carbon uptake.
At regional level, the brief points to fire-prevention planning in Tuscany and Lombardy, where climate projections, vegetation dynamics and fire-behaviour models are already used to prioritise areas for intervention.
Why long-term observation is the missing link
Resilience cannot be read off a single measurement or judged only after a disaster. It has to be observed across years and decades.
Through its distributed network of long-term research sites and socio-ecological platforms, eLTER tracks tree growth and mortality, soil moisture, carbon pools and water balance over exactly those timescales. Remote-sensing time series help flag early warnings, while sustained field observation supplies the evidence needed to calibrate models and to test whether management interventions genuinely improve resistance and recovery. Comparable observations from across Europe also make it possible to identify which approaches work, under which conditions and with which trade-offs.
“Long-term observations are what turn resilience from an appealing concept into something we can test and improve. They allow us to see whether recovery is slowing, whether a forest is approaching a threshold, and whether management is actually increasing its capacity to cope with future extremes”, Vacchiano adds.
Europe's forests will keep meeting climate shocks. The choice, the brief concludes, is between reacting after each damaging event and building the capacity to anticipate, absorb, recover and adapt.
Read the full policy brief: Forests at Risk: Measuring and Building Resilience Against Extreme Climate Events
A forest can still be standing while losing its capacity to recover
Credit
Evgeni Dimitrov/eLTER
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