An evidence-based synthesis report
Productive and Biodiverse: Managing Europe’s Forests for Economic and Ecological Outcomes
IUFRO World Series Vol. 46
Policymakers, forest owners, and managers are increasingly expected to consider biodiversity, wood production, carbon, resilience, and other ecosystem services together.
These objectives can reinforce one another, but they can also require different forest conditions, timescales, and management choices.
Productive and Biodiverse brings together the scientific evidence needed to understand those relationships more clearly, where synergies are possible, where trade-offs remain, and what this means for decisions in managed European forests.
Editors
Nelson Grima · Laura Walther · Frank Krumm
Lead authors
Frank Krumm · Andreea Spinu · Zuzana Dobšinská · Tommaso Chiti · Nataša Lovric · Maria Nijnik
Contributing authors
Jürgen Bauhus · Denis Dobrynin · Adam Felton · Oliver Frings · Lenka Haluskova · Stefanie Linser · Sandra Lupien · Silvina Manrique · Simone Martino · Mariana Melnykovych · David Miller · Yoan Paillet · Petra Palátová · Chad C. Papa · Ana Rey · Christian Rosset · Patrick O. Waeber · Livia Zapponi · Miguel A. Zavala
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Biodiversity must be measured in multiple ways
Forest biodiversity includes composition, structure, and function. No single indicator captures all three, so monitoring needs complementary indicators and data sources.
Climate effects go beyond forest carbon
Assessing climate outcomes requires considering forest carbon, carbon stored in harvested wood products, and substitution effects separately, because they operate over different timescales and system boundaries.
Aligning forest management with multiple goals
Integrative Forest Management (IFM) is a practical, science-based framework for combining forest management with biodiversity conservation while additionally supporting climate resilience and long-term economic forest value.
Implementation needs enabling conditions
Institutions, incentives, stakeholder participation, and knowledge sharing all affect whether multifunctional forest management can work in practice.
Key findings
The study points towards context-specific, adaptive forest management rather than one model applied uniformly across Europe.
Productive and biodiverse outcomes depend on combining different approaches across forests and landscapes, matching them to local ecological and socio-economic conditions, monitoring what happens, and adapting as conditions change. Trade-offs remain, but better evidence can make them clearer and support more informed decisions.
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Diverse and resilient forests and sustainable forest products have a key role to play in tackling climate change and contributing to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).