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.

HOMED will provide a full set of science-based, innovative practical methods and tools to assess and control emerging or invasive pests and pathogens threatening EU forests, following a holistic and multi-actor approach. Holistic because it will improve strategies of risk assessment and management by targeting the successive phases of invasion (transport, introduction, establishment, spread), and developing mitigation methods for each phase, i.e. prevention, detection and diagnosis, surveillance, eradication and control tools. Multi-actor because scientists will communicate with stakeholders all along the project; forest managers, biosecurity agencies, policy makers and environmental NGOs will be asked to express their needs and constrains and validate the tools as they develop. Innovation will be central, as the new tools for pest management will benefit from the most advanced technology, e.g. electronic sensors, hyper spectral cameras, the latest satellite constellation, high-throughput sequencing, unmanned aerial vehicles and artificial intelligence. As it is impossible to foresee the next invasive or emerging pest or pathogen, the overall approach will be generic. However, the new tools will be tested on four main types of pests and pathogens, i.e. foliar moths and needle blights causing tree growth loss, wood boring beetles and dieback fungi causing tree mortality. Prominent experts from the main forested countries of EU and the main regions of origin of invasive pests, e.g. North America, Australasia, China and South Africa, will contribute to the project, and ensure continuity and complementarity with past and current Euphresco and EU projects. By developing cost-effective, environmentally friendly tools for the prevention, detection and control, the project will reduce the tremendous economic losses caused by invasive forest pests and pathogens and help to maintain the critical ecosystem services provided by EU forests, including climate change mitigation.

Forest landscape restoration and afforestation have recently received much international attention as a crucial opportunity for mitigating climate change (CC). Therefore, it features prominently in many political initiatives such as the EU Green Deal and the Bonn Challenge. Yet, the ongoing increase in biotic and abiotic stress driven by CC puts forests under threat. In the face of CC, adaptation and mitigation by forests are ultimately linked, because the ability of forests to sequester carbon (C) in the long run depends on the ability of trees to cope with multiple stresses. A growing body of evidence suggests that mixed forest plantations, i.e., plantations where several tree species are mixed, are more efficient in sequestrating C, while better coping with CC-related stress. Mixed plantations thus represent an opportunity for an important nature-based solution for CC mitigation and adaptation. However, monocultures still dominate the world?s forest plantations. The reasons for the apparent resistance to mixed plantations among landowners and stakeholders need to be identified and addressed in future forest policies to promote the large-scale expansion of more CC-resilient mixed forest plantations. One of the possible factors that may have prevented the expansion of mixed plantations at large scales is insufficient scientific evidence for practitioners and policy-makers. Using a global network of forest biodiversity experiments (TreeDivNet), we will provide a mechanistic understanding of how tree diversity, species identities and management (thinning and fertilization) influence both the potential of mixed forest plantations to mitigate (C sequestration) and adapt (drought and herbivory resilience) to CC, in a win-win approach. In addition, we will translate this knowledge into guidelines that can be widely adopted by practitioners and policy-makers. The TreeDivNet network comprises 26 experiments spread across the globe, with ca. 1.2M planted trees. All these experiments were based on a common, statistically sound design that allows detection of causal relationships between tree diversity, management and forest ecosystem functioning (incl. C sequestration). The functional and mechanistic focus of MixForChange and the contrasting environmental contexts embedded in the network will allow us to scale-up our findings beyond case studies to provide evidence-based guidelines for mixed plantation management in a broad range of environments. Moreover, MixForChange will analyse in a common framework, and at unprecedented scale, synergies and trade-offs between the CC mitigation and adaptation potential of mixed plantations and the fulfilment of stakeholders? objectives. The societal impact of MixForChange will be ensured by a strong focus on knowledge transfer and capacity-building at all levels of management and governance. MixForChange will make an important contribution to promoting mixed forest plantations as nature-based solutions to fight CC.