CREAF presents a platform with 22 resources to improve forest ecosystem services

Forests are not just trees. They are living systems capable of doing many things at once: capturing carbon, regulating water, protecting soil, conserving biodiversity or providing resources such as wood and mushrooms. In this sense, we speak of multifunctional ecosystems, capable of offering several services at the same time according to the needs of each territory.

But this complexity also poses a challenge: how can we manage forests taking into account all these functions at the same time? Management can make the forest do one thing better, but to the detriment of another, so how can we decide how to manage each territory? And, above all, how can we measure whether we are doing it well?

To support this more integrated management, CREAF has developed the Ecosystem Services Platform , a digital tool that includes 22 tools or guides available to help managers and owners evaluate, improve and learn about management options that promote forest ecosystem services. Each tool is catalogued with important information for the user, for example which ecosystem services it allows to evaluate or improve, who developed it, a description of the tool and direct access to each tool. The options available on the platform include different methodologies for assessing ecosystem services, guides and recommendations, along with resources for assessing or monitoring carbon, biodiversity or sustainable forest management, among others. The creation of the platform was one of the objectives of the European research project DigiMedFor.

The platform was born from a real need detected by the Forestry Consortium of Catalonia, which conveyed to CREAF the difficulty of knowing and accessing the different existing tools for measuring ecosystem services. From there, joint work has been developed with a continuous feedback process to ensure that the tool was truly useful and usable.

The development has been led by CREAF technician Burcu Berk , with the support of Enrique Doblas, head of transfer at the center.

In addition, it is a living tool, the platform can be updated with new tools and functionalities, and users can contact the development team to stay up to date with the latest news.

The platform has been built with artificial intelligence technology (Bolt) and is accessible in several languages, with the aim of bringing these tools closer to a wide audience of forest managers.

For example, the platform includes tools such as ForESMap , which helps to estimate the ecosystem services of Catalonia's forests; and also in Catalonia there is the Forest Climate Credit System, which allows to quantify and certify benefits such as carbon capture, water regulation or biodiversity improvement, and translate them into climate credits within the framework of forestry projects. It also incorporates initiatives such as the Catalan Forest Laboratory , promoted by CREAF, which develops models to understand how ecosystems respond to global change and support decision-making in management and conservation. In the area of certification, the platform includes the PEFC Ecosystem Services Platform , which visualizes with data the environmental benefits of certified forests, and open data tools such as REDIAM , which provides geospatial information to analyze and integrate ecosystem services in decision-making.

This tool has been developed within the framework of the European DigiMedFor project, with the aim of promoting the digitalization of the sector, integrating technologies such as artificial intelligence, geospatial analysis or digital models to improve forest management and guarantee the traceability of resources from the forest to the end user.

The project brings together 22 international partners, from research centers to forest industry actors, and uses forests from the Mediterranean Model Forest Network as test sites to apply these solutions in real contexts.

With this new tool, CREAF wants to contribute to taking a step forward towards more informed, adaptive and multifunctional forest management.