Actual impact is realized in the individual estate by the forest owner responsible for managing the forest. Policies, regulations, and proper governance is there to steer and help, but the actions eventually take place on the ground. To that end, ALTERFOR has delivered FMM descriptions at stand level of unprecedented detail in a coherent format that allows knowledge transfer between countries. All CSA have provided demonstration sites of aFMMs with rich documentation including pictures or videos in local language and with links to the project homepage. This will make it easier both to discuss what the methods involve and to apply the silvicultural treatments associated with the respective aFMM.
Case teams upgraded respective decision support systems for projecting the long-term provision of ecosystem services. This concerns such important aspects as the impacts of climate change, spatial explicitness, and consideration to forest owner diversity and their actual behaviour. The capacity to make realistic assessments of different forest strategies in Europe is thus improved.
To promote the capacity to implement aFMMs the ALTERFOR adopted a multi-actor approach, guided by the Research-Integration-Utilisation (RIU) model. Based on the RIU model, a road map for implementation is available. The road map provides guidelines for how to identify and analyse influential actors in terms of their networks, interests and power, and what to observe when it comes to institutional and governance aspects.
The long-term consequences of a widespread adoption of aFMMs have been investigated, providing a link to the policy processes at EU level. ALTERFOR results emphasize the importance of the diversity of conditions in the different European regions. Implementing aFMMs could call for more coordination of management at the landscape level in some countries; or it could require less central steering in other countries. The relative importance of different ecosystem services various a lot among countries and regions. This indicates that European forests and societies might benefit from, on the one hand, better coordination of forest-related policies and from, on the other hand, avoiding oversteering and being sensitive to specific conditions and demands of the Member States.
The knowledge, tools and instruments offered by ALTERFOR have the potential to lead to considerable long term impacts. By adopting alternative, though realistic and implementable, forest management models EU could improve its biodiversity status, increase harvests to satisfy fibre demands, and still maintain its role as net exporter of forest products to outside EU over the 21st century. Compared to current management, by successively introducing a combination of improved multifunctional and production management on only half the production forest, around 5% additional volume could be harvested at the end of the century, and still the biodiversity status would be better than with current management. The introduction of forest management alternatives adapted to climate change is also shown to limit risks and increase resilience. The means are there, the mobilization of forest owners, policy makers and other stakeholders is the next step.
