Precise information on the current status of forests is required to forecast forest management effects which allows informed policy decisions. To inform and support the implementation of these policy objectives, PathFinder will develop and demonstrate an innovative integrated forest monitoring and pathway assessment system. This system, for the first time, will allow a consistent EU greenhouse gas reporting of the LULUCF sector, but, at the same time combine such monitoring capability with advanced pathway assessment to help plan the essential policy and implementation steps towards achieving the policy targets. The continuous monitoring of forests facilitates controlling of target achievement and possibly adjustment of pathways. PathFinder goes beyond the state-of-art by the most efficient, combined use of field and remotely sensed data for high-resolution mapping and precisely estimating forest attributes. The cooperation of the largest forest monitoring organizations operating in the EU, i.e., national forest inventories (NFIs) and the network installed under ICP Forests, provides a rich data base of harmonized ground truth information which will be complemented by an innovative field survey of consistently assessed field monitoring sites. Advanced measurement devices will provide an audio-visual digital twin including genetic properties of the consistently monitored forest for maximum transparency and interoperability of new data. The analysis of combined databases will improve our understanding of fluxes among C pools. The precise forest information of the monitoring system will feed into a new scenario framework that forecasts future forest scenarios and outcomes of forest management alternatives. The scenarios facilitate trade-off analysis of forest ES and are potential alleys in the pathway assessment. The pathway assessment is a co-creation activity in which novel monitoring and scenario studies are integrated with EU-level stakeholder visions and knowledge

The core objective of SINTETIC is to set up and demonstrate a traceability system for trees, logs and boards based on ICT through a central Geodatabase covering all the forest-based value chain. This faces the 3 main drawbacks of the ICTs in the forestry sector: -Deployed only in areas with mature timber market (North/Central EU vs. South EU). -Currently cannot be used during the whole value chain, causing several losses. -A reliable tool for tracing the origin of forest product is missing, still allowing illegal practices. Along with the core objective, the SINTETIC proposal will pursuit: SOBJ1: To achieve a higher value recovery of timber assortments (+10%). SOBJ2: To increase the overall efficiency of the timber supply chain. SOBJ3: To provide a greater competitive advantage of the EU forest industry (yield of high value sawnwood products from 20% to 22%). SOBJ4: To increase of the EU forested area under active management (aggregation of 12.000 ha fragmented properties). SOBJ5: To increase both the timber value, the resilience and the ecosystem services provided. SOBJ6: To tackle illegal logging and the related timber trade (-15%). SOBJ7: To facilitate a homogeneous and widespread uptake of the ICTs in the forest sector. The main expected results are: RES1: Manual marking and quality assessment (traceability system). RES2: Smartphone APP for motormanual operations. RES3: Processor head prototype. RES4: Harvester LiDAR. RES5: Sawmill sensors and traceability of sawnwood. RES6: Earth observation illegal logging alert service. RES7: Forest ownership aggregation platform. To make all this possible, SINTETIC will develop a geodatabase with a set of data providers interconnected by the traceability system. It'll provide: 1) Multi-platform data acquisition for the whole supply chain. 2) Data transmission with sesecured digital tools and physical IDs on timber products. 3) Data storage, analysis and distribution for the generation of further services.