EUSTAFOR attends HoliSoils meeting in Barcelona

Two years into the project, HoliSoils consortium partners gathered in Barcelona’s beautiful Sant Pau Art Nouveau site for the project’s Annual Meeting and General Assembly (18-20 April 2023). HoliSoils – Holistic management practices, modeling & monitoring for European Forest Soils – a Horizon 2020 project coordinated by Luke (Finland), is developing a large toolkit of data, models, maps and guidelines. Some of these are crucial updates of already existing tools, while others are yet to be developed.

Some early findings are already included in a first HoliSoils policy brief, fine-tuned during the meeting and published subsequently by the European Forest Institute (EFI).  EUSTAFOR joined the meeting as a member of the Stakeholder and End-user Advisory Board (SEAB). SEAB includes 13 current board members. As most of the panelists from SEAB, EUSTAFOR emphasised the importance of the holistic view, that should not only look the soils, but will instead address how these results correlate with the aboveground parts of forest ecosystems.

The field trip on the third day visited one of the HoliSoils test sites, the Llobera study site, which is a demonstrative forest management stand for integrated fire management. Different management options are being tested to reduce fuel load and break vertical fuel continuity to make these forests resistant to wildfires. A second stop in the field was at the Santa Coloma de Queralt wildfire site, an area that was badly burnt in 2021. The discussion centered on wildfire effects on soils and post-fire management activities for soil protection and forest regeneration. The field trip was organised by CTFC and the University of Barcelona in collaboration with the University of Lleida and Diputació de Barcelona.

More information about the project and the meeting is available at the following link.