ALTERFOR project meeting in Padova, Italy
On April 3-6 professor Gintautas Mozgeris from the Institute of Forest Management and Wood Science and lecturer Ekaterina Makrickiene from the Institute of Forest Biology and Silviculture attended the annual meeting of the „ALTERFOR“ project consortium, which took place in Padova, Italy.
ALTERFOR is a HORIZON 2020 project with ten case study areas, situated in nine European countries: Germany, Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, and Turkey. The consortium of scientists and practitioners (non-academic project partners) are aiming to provide deep knowledge regarding alternative forest management models (FMMs) and how they can affect the provision of ecosystem services; to involve relevant actors from different fields (such as forestry, nature conservation, renewable energy, and water management) and to facilitate efficient knowledge transfer to adopt alternative FMMs.
The attendants of the consortium meeting discussed the achieved milestones of the project. Big attention was paid to the results of stakeholder meetings, which took place in all participating countries. In most cases the project participants stated, that the participation of stakeholders helped to formulate and/or evaluate the alternative FMMs. Also the participants discussed the results of modelling of the possible impact of alternative FMMs on the future provision of ecosystem services. The project members agreed on the future upscaling of the results to the European level and the methodological part of the future scientific paper.
During the visit to Padova, the participants of the meeting took part in two visits. The first one was the excursion to the botanical garden of Padova university, which is the oldest university botanical garden in the World. The second field visit was performed in frames of Travellab. Travellab is an innovative format of cross-regional knowledge transfer, and combines the field excursion with the further round-table discussion. The Travellab was arranged in the forests of Veneto and Udine regions surrounding city Venice, which, of course, associates with water and tourism. Nevertheless, forests along the shorline are playing an important role for recreation.
The participants of the meeting visited the recreational forest of San Dona di Piave, the oak-hornbeam stand in Carlino and Italian pine plantation in Bibione. Several stakeholders, such as city mayor of San Dona di Piave, forest planting sponsors, afforestation agents, forest owners and specialists in non-wood forest products joined the excursion and explained their views and expectations from the visited forest areas. The excursion was followed up by the round table, during which the stakeholders and project participants could discuss various relevant issues of Italian forest management.
The next meeting of the project participants will take place in Dresden during the 69 Annual meeting of the German Forest Association, which is one of the non-academic ALTERFOR partners. The ALTERFOR project results will be presented to the attendants of the meeting, and the project participants will continue the discussion of the results from ALTERFOR case studies.
