Use of National Forest Inventories to downscale European forest diversity spatial information in five test areas, covering different geo-physical and geobotanical conditions

The project "Use of National Forest Inventories to downscale European forest diversity spatial information in five test areas, covering different geo-physical and geo-botanical conditions", referred also as "forest downscaling" (JRC contract 382340 F1SC) covers one of the seven topics that have been studied in the frame of the Regulation (EC) 2152/2003 on the monitoring of forest and environmental interactions, the socalled "Forest Focus" Regulation. This study was conducted by a European consortium coordinated by the Italian Academy of Forest Sciences (Italy) and included partners from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the Institute of Forest Ecosystem Research of the Czech Republic, the German Federal Research Centre for Forestry and Forest Products, and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. The overall supervision of the project and the processing of forest spatial pattern were done by the Joint Research Centre. This study addressed the link between field based forest biological diversity data and landscape-level forest pattern information. The former were made available from National Forest Inventories (NFIs) at plot level in five different countries; their harmonisation was implemented for the first time and benefited from outcomes of the COST Action-E43 on core biodiversity variables. For the latter, landscape level forest spatial pattern maps were automatically derived from available remote sensing based forest cover maps. The relation-ships between selected pattern and biodiversity variables available from the two different data sources were studied. Seven case studies for a total area of about 100,000 km2 were selected in five European ecological regions: one site in Germany (Atlantic zone), one in Sweden (Boreal zone), two in Czech Republic (Continental zone), one in Switzerland (Alpine zone) and two in Italy (Mediterranean zone).