Conference: Forêt Méditerranéenne t. XL, 3, 351-358, At 6th Mediterranean Forest Week: Role of Mediterranean forests in the Paris Agreement
Integration of multi-sourced and multi-scale forest monitoring data for addressing local to global challenges on forest ecosystems within the framework of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement involves, directly or indirectly, forest ecosystems as a key component to achieve climate change mitigation targets. Recent research suggests that forest managers and policy makers should rather put the focus on the adaptation of forest ecosystems to climate change (as other international processes demand), this representing the main challenge that will also determine the capacity of forests to act as carbon sinks. This is particularly relevant for forest ecosystems in the Mediterranean basin, for which the expected impacts of climate change are huge, and where forest growth and survival are strongly limited by water scarcity. Assessing the ability of forest ecosystems to adapt to climate change together with their key role in climate change mitigation requires sound scientific information (and data). For this purpose, in the Big Data Era, holistic, multi-sourced, and multi-scale forest monitoring is required together with Data Science to encompass the integration of heterogeneous data from: i) multiple spatio-temporal scales, and ii) multiple sources and monitoring techniques. Two relevant examples of forest data harmonization at European and global scales are highlighted. The additional big challenge is to make data available to the scientific community, managers and decision-makers to be able to address, from multiple perspectives, the global challenges in relation to forests.