Full week of restoration discussions at the SUPERB Project final conference in Leuven

The SUPERB (Systemic solutions for upscaling of urgent ecosystem restoration for forest-related biodiversity and ecosystem services) project has held its final General Assembly in Leuven, Belgium. The participants from different parts of Europe were introduced to the main results of the project delivered by demo sites, work packages and through research. The demonstration sites in 13 countries offered practical knowledge of the problems and possibilities of restoration work.

Two big outcomes of the project are the online services Forest Knowledge Gateway and Forest Restoration Projects Marketplace. The gateway serves as the central knowledge platform of restoration-related issues: The SUPERB project resources will be made available through this gateway. The Marketplace is there to connect needs and solutions in restoration projects. The gateway is already published (https://forestknowledge.eu/), and the link to the Marketplace will be added to the Gateway in two weeks.

The field trip was to the demo site in the Netherlands, Horst aan de Maas, in the heathlands, where they have distributed rock dust in order to mitigate soil acidification and planted native species to add diversity and resilience to the area, which is used a lot for recreation. Another visit was to the forest area in Groote Heide, near Eindhoven, where the restoration works were started already in 2010. This area was owned by a local water company, and the main purpose of forest management was to keep the forest resilient with mixtures of tree species, keeping the hydrological measures in mind.

Piotr Borkowski and Ulla Lehtonen, an Associate from Metsahallitus, contributed respectively to a panel discussion “Beyond SUPERB: The Future of Forest Restoration in Europe, on 8-9 September 2025, and to the General Assembly on 10-12 September, both in in Leuven, Belgium. State forests perspectives and possible follow-up actions were presented and discussed by both participants.

Gallery