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EU forest monitoring should combine up-to-date science with best practice

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 9, pages 743–744 (2025)Cite this article

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The European Commission is currently discussing a regulation to monitor European forests1. The goal is to implement a monitoring framework that provides baseline information for assessing the effects of ongoing climate changes, including extreme weather events, on European forests. The monitoring programme is designed to inform policy developments to protect forests against the effects of such events. Although we welcome this legislation, the current draft shows major shortcomings. A previous analysis2 has already identified key limitations that concern the choice of variables and indicators to measure, data quality and harmonization procedures, and integration with existing pan-European networks. Here we highlight an additional and, in our view, even more fundamental issue: the new European law not only prescribes what variables need to be measured, but also specifies the particular methods that must be used.

On a fundamental level, having governments prescribe scientific methods for monitoring might set a dangerous precedent against the independence of science. Regarding this European law, we are concerned that prescribing measurement methods instead of setting data-quality requirements will compromise its effectiveness. European legislators cannot be expected to be up to date with developments in the diverse scientific fields involved in forest monitoring, and therefore they are not well-placed to decide the appropriate methods for data collection. Novel monitoring approaches, as well as recalibrations and reassessments of existing methodologies, might be difficult to implement if they first need approval by the European Parliament. This monitoring system might quickly become obsolete if changes require approval from the EU’s parliamentary bureaucracy. Conversely, the choice of relevant and state-of-the-art methods might enable this monitoring system to assist with pressing management issues, such as wildfires.

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Fig. 1: LFMC predicted from radiative transfer models shows inferior performance to a different approach based on random forests.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Spanish MICINN (PID2022-138158OB-I00) and the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101003890 project FirEUrisk. We acknowledge technical assistance from À. Cunill Camprubí.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest and Agricultural Science and Engineering, Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain

    Víctor Resco De Dios

  2. JRU CTFC-AGROTECNIO-CERCA Centre, Lleida, Spain

    Víctor Resco De Dios

  3. Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales, Australia

    Matthias M. Boer

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  1. Víctor Resco De Dios
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  2. Matthias M. Boer
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Correspondence to Víctor Resco De Dios.

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Resco De Dios, V., Boer, M.M. EU forest monitoring should combine up-to-date science with best practice. Nat Ecol Evol 9, 743–744 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02672-0

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