The new EU funded "MoniFun" project, officially known as "Co-creating a blueprint of a harmonised European Forest Multifunctionality Monitoring System - MoniFun”, began its operations on January 1, 2024. This initiative is aimed to establish the blueprint for a comprehensive European Forest Multifunctionality Monitoring System (EFMMS). The EFMMS deals with the challenges posed by climate change and environmental stressors on Europe's forests. The MoniFun project is a collaborative effort involving a research consortium of 13 project partners from 11 European countries.

Project Coordinator Lauri Mehtätalo (Natural Resource Institute Finland - LUKE):

“The need for such an initiative has arisen due to lack of harmonized European-level information required by policymakers and other stakeholders regarding the multifaceted aspects of forests. These aspects encompass properties related to forest resources, and the connection of forests with society, climate and biodiversity to support progress towards climate action and reversing biodiversity loss.”

The initiative will use a multi-actor approach to ensure the wide applicability of the monitoring system, addressing the information needs of various institutions and stakeholders. The project aims at mapping the essential information needs and responding to these using data with sufficient quality and the most suitable data sources, such as remote sensing, national forest inventories and other existing data sources.

Key innovations in MoniFun are tools that can efficiently combine these data sources using semi-automatic methods without a need to risk the confidentiality of the original data sets. To address methodological challenges, MoniFun will develop harmonized solutions, maximizing the system's applicability.

Project duration: 48 months (01.01.2024 – 31.12.2027)

MoniFun is funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under project no. 101134991

FNR contact: Vanaja Vankayalapati