The research will be carried out in seven mountain regions across Europe covering the most important mountain forest types within the continental, mediterranean and boreal biomes and representing distinct biophysical and governance settings. Generic themes across all case study regions are (a) the identification of the relationships among the main ecosystem services (see above) along environmental gradients; (b) the analysis and further development of policy and governance frameworks, (c) the identification of economically efficient management strategies for generic portfolios of ecosystem services from landowner and public perspectives; and (d) the exploration of the sensitivity of current management concepts to climatic and socio-economic uncertainties. In each case study, specific multifunctional planning problems will be analysed in close cooperation with regional stakeholder panels. The scientific synthesis will integrate the findings from generic and case study specific analyses. To support interested stakeholders beyond the lifetime of ARANGE, a web-based decision support tool box for multifunctional mountain forest management will be a major product of the project.
The involvement of five SME partners in research and development activities emphasize the project mission to produce usable knowledge and tools for practical mountain forest management. Outreach activities will focus on additional SMEs in the case study regions and beyond as potential users of ARANGE output.
The four main pillars of the concept underlying ARANGE include
- regional case studies
- strong stakeholder involvement
- state-of-the-art models and tools to predict forest conditions and assess ES and
- novel planning and decision support tools.
