Projects

The knowledge transfer portal PROLES is the main outcome of the strategic collaboration between the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, CZU Prague, and the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic.

The portal provides Czech foresters, forest managers, and policymakers with the latest knowledge on forest disturbance ecology and management, climate change impacts and adaptation, biological invasions, and other topics.

Importantly, it systematically translates into Czech relevant policy documents, such as policy briefs, reports, and strategies, produced by international initiatives and research projects.

The portal is closely linked to FoRISK, hosted by the European Forest Institute. In addition to a wide range of articles, reports, and news, it features interactive applications that provide access to long-term records of forest damage in the Czech Republic, various spatially explicit risk assessments, and annually updated forest change maps based on remote sensing. PROLES is currently one of the Faculty’s main knowledge transfer channels.

The HIVE project has established the Forest Invasion Synthesis Centre (FISC, https://www.forestinvasion.cz/) at the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, CZU.

The FISC is built around the ERA Chair holder, Dr. Andrew M. Liebhold, a leading international expert in invasion biology. The project addresses the persistent gap in research capacity in EU Widening Countries by assembling a team of researchers around the Chair and introducing an innovative organisational model based on socio-ecological synthesis centres.

Rather than following a traditional hierarchical lab structure, research is organised around thematic Working Groups that draw on experts from outside the host institution, spanning ecology, nature conservation, biosecurity, and policy.The FISC is now fully operational. It runs several thematic Working Groups led by prominent scientists from around the world, has filled five postdoctoral positions, and conducts a broad range of communication and dissemination activities aimed at the academic community in EU Widening Countries and the wider stakeholder community.

FORbEST focuses on protecting and restoring carbon-rich, biodiverse forest ecosystems as a means of meeting EU climate and biodiversity targets. The project works across five EU biogeographical regions and one tropical region in northern Thailand, examining how past and current governance and management practices affect carbon storage and biodiversity. It combines remote sensing, artificial intelligence, citizen science, and participatory Living Labs, in which local communities, forest managers, and other stakeholders co-design sustainable management practices.

The FRRC team is responsible for simulation modelling in the Czech Living Lab, located in the Bohemian Forest National Park (Šumava). We are exploring the future provision of ecosystem services and shifts in nature conservation benchmarks, such as deadwood volume, the number of habitat trees, and the variability of tree dimensions, under climate change and changing disturbance regimes. Above all, we aim to identify management regimes that best balance carbon and biodiversity objectives. This research is part of a pan-European experiment spanning seven Living Labs that represent the diversity of Europe’s socio-ecological conditions.

Moths of the genus Leucinodes include several African species whose larvae feed inside the fruits of eggplant and other solanaceous crops. Because the larvae develop hidden within the fruit, infested produce easily passes unnoticed through the supply chain, and these species are frequently intercepted in imports to the European Union. Identifying them correctly is not straightforward: the African species were long confused with the Asian eggplant fruit and shoot borer, Leucinodes orbonalis, a regulated quarantine pest in the EU, and several of them were recognised as distinct species only relatively recently. Reliable identification is therefore essential for well-founded phytosanitary decisions.

The project addresses current knowledge gaps in the identification, distribution, host plant associations, and biology of African Leucinodes species. By combining taxonomic research with field surveys in their native range, it aims to provide plant health authorities and researchers with a sounder basis for recognising these species and assessing the risks they pose.

The project is coordinated by Dr. Richard Mally. Fieldwork is carried out by Prof. Elizabeth Balyejusa Kizito in Uganda, Dr. Boris Fouelifack Nintidem in Cameroon, and Dr. Daniel Ashie Kotey in Ghana.

This project aims to identify patterns and drivers of drought impacts on carbon-water cycling in European forests, focusing on water-use efficiency (WUE) across various tree species and environmental conditions. Climate change and extreme events affect WUE by altering biophysical processes, potentially compromising the future carbon sequestration capacity of forest ecosystems. While process-based ecosystem models are essential tools for estimating carbon-water cycling, their ability to simulate drought effects is limited.

Using multiyear flux data from eddy covariance sites, this project will:

• identify patterns and drivers, like drought timing and severity, that affect WUE dynamics,
• evaluate the Biome-BGCMuSo model’s simulation of carbon and water fluxes, and
• improve model accuracy for drought effects on WUE.

Project also aims to project WUE dynamics under climate change scenarios and attribute changes to climatic drivers. The findings will contribute to the development of more accurate models to project forest carbon sequestration under climate change.

NatuRISE will develop new evidence, datasets, indicators, models, assessment approaches and decision-support tools to improve understanding of the benefits, costs, trade-offs and distributional effects of nature restoration.

The project will combine new data, indicators and ecological, land-use and socio-economic models to assess how different restoration options may affect nature, economies and people, including who benefits and where trade-offs may arise. These EU-scale integrated assessments will feed into a decision-support tool to help compare restoration options and identify effective and equitable pathways.

Four case studies will provide real-world settings in which NatuRISE approaches can be tested and refined. They will connect scientific assessment with local and regional restoration challenges, decision contexts and stakeholder perspectives, helping to ensure that project results are relevant and useful in practice. Stakeholder engagement is an integral part of the NatuRISE research and impact pathway.

Policymakers, public authorities, restoration practitioners, land and forest managers, researchers, civil society organisations and other stakeholders will contribute knowledge and experience throughout the project.

DivLand establishes a Centre for Landscape and Biodiversity with the aim of producing research outputs that directly support strategic decision-making in nature conservation and landscape management in the Czech Republic.

The project addresses key challenges in landscape resilience, ecosystem functioning, and biodiversity protection in the context of climate change, with a particular focus on biological invasions.

Research is organised into five thematic working groups (Resilient Landscape, Forest Ecosystems, Agrosystems & Soil, Invasions, and Functional Biodiversity), complemented by a dedicated Synthesis group.

Each working group develops monitoring systems and evaluation indicators and analyses both existing and newly created databases on Czech landscapes and ecosystems. The project will culminate in a set of strategic measures for sustainable landscape and ecosystem management.

Between 2018 and 2022, the Czech Republic experienced the largest forest disturbance in its recorded history: a drought-triggered outbreak of the spruce bark beetle. The outbreak had severe environmental and economic impacts, which called for legislative changes, support for forest owners, and new management and planning tools.

The project aimed to deliver essential information on the triggers, drivers, and impacts of the outbreak, and to understand how forest owners and managers perceived the evolving forest risks, the causes of the disturbance, and the effectiveness of state intervention.

Building on these findings, it proposed a strategy for the state forest administration to systematically prepare the Czech forestry sector for similar events, which are likely to recur in the future. The project drew extensively on knowledge transfer from concurrent European initiatives, including FoRISK and the Horizon Europe project RESONATE.

RESONATE investigated how to strengthen the resilience of European forests and their associated value chains in the face of climate change and growing disturbance risks. The project addressed four interconnected challenges: shifts in tree species suitability, increasing frequency of forest disturbances, changing societal demand for forest products and ecosystem services, and declining biodiversity. Through nine case studies across Germany, the Czech Republic, the UK, Finland, France, Croatia, Ireland, and the Iberian Peninsula, the consortium developed scenario-based response strategies, a continental-scale disturbance mapping tool, and a Resilience Dashboard to support decision-making.

The FRRC team investigated forest resilience to natural disturbances and climate change using iLand, a forest landscape and disturbance model. Our work focused on planted spruce forests in Central Europe and the main stressors affecting them in this region: drought, bark beetle outbreaks, windthrow, and heavy browsing pressure from game, which hampers forest recovery after disturbance.