How to balance forestry and biodiversity conservation

Maintaining and enhancing the biodiversity and resilience of European forests is key to the sustainable provision of ecosystem services in a rapidly changing environment. More than ever, to do so requires an informed, fluent, and effective dialogue between scientists, policy makers, forest landowners, forest managers, and nature conservationists. The European Network INTEGRATE aims, on the basis of science and forestry, to provide a forum for such dialogue to further enhance the protection of forest-related biodiversity in the framework of sustainable forest management. This is timely and relevant for the ongoing international forest-related discussions, e.g. the post-2020 Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and in the European Union for the EU Green Deal, and the EU Biodiversity and EU Forest Strategies.

This publication, produced within the framework of the European Network Integrate, has been written by more than 150 researchers and practitioners from 50 institutions and 19 countries. It explores and describes different approaches and tools for the integration of nature conservation into forest management. In the first section, the theoretical framing, the past and current context and framework conditions, and future challenges and solutions for integrated forest management are broadly discussed in 12 chapters. The second part of the book highlights 32 selected examples of forest enterprises, forest owners and regional initiatives from all over Europe. This Tour d’Europe presents an amazing variety of innovative regional- to local-scale approaches of how to balance biodiversity conservation with other ecosystem services in sustainable forest management. The last section of the book presents a toolbox of integrative measures derived from the examples; local forest owners and managers can use this toolbox to get an overview of measures that have been successfully applied.