ANK-SURVEY: Forest Living Labs

Lead Institute WO Institute of Forest Ecosystems

[Translate to English:] Fichtenunterwuchs auf einer Waldfläche.

ANK-SURVEY - Forest Living Labs: Experiments, Synthesis, and Governance for Optimizing Natural Climate Protection in Forest Ecosystems

Forests are an essential natural sink for greenhouse gases, indispensable for climate protection, the preservation of biodiversity, and the provision of a wide range of additional ecosystem services. The climate crisis is altering forests at an unprecedented speed and intensity, meaning that both forests and their management must be adapted to climate and ecosystem change in order to continue fulfilling their protective functions and delivering the needed ecosystem services. Achieving this requires facts and evidence that can only be supplied by highly integrated transformation research focused on climate‑adapted forests with sustainable and secure conservation outcomes and a socially acceptable approach to forestry.

Background and Objective

Living labs provide an essential and irreplaceable platform for inter‑ and transdisciplinary transformation research targeting the future of forests. The ANK‑SURVEY initiative seeks to showcase and test a supra‑regional forest living lab, deliver a comprehensive synthesis of data and outcomes, and foster the integration of the research agenda within the forest‑ and timber‑domains.

Approach

Several forest living labs at the regional level in the Harz mountains and in Lower Bavaria comprise, as core elements,

a network of spatially distributed experimental plots with varying levels of utilisation and investigation intensity,
their digital counterparts (digital twins), and
the integration of practice‑based trials as part of a research‑practice network.

Using remote‑sensing data, modelling, and additional forestry‑relevant geodata, the data from the regional living labs are synthesised and regionalised into a supra‑regional living lab for the spruce‑dominated, highly exposed to biotic disturbances, low‑mountain regiona bearing strong transformation demands.

A comprehensive involvement of the key stakeholder groups in the forest sector incorporates societal, ecological, and economic requirements concerning:

the development of visions of the future forest and its functions (co‑creation),
joint research activities (co‑production), and
the assessment of the resulting ecosystem services as well as the simulation outcomes of the digital twins (co‑evaluation)

— all in line with a real‑lab approach to transformation research.

As part of a synthesis of the obtained results, conceptual and implementation recommendations are derived for bundling the activities within ongoing forest‑ and wood‑research programmes.