Forest management across Europe: Towards climate-smart strategies

This professional on-site training course is for PhD candidates and postdocs from various countries and cultural backgrounds working in different scientific disciplines but related to European forests. The course will be organised at the BOKU training centre “Traunkirchen” in Austria. This venue is perfect for this course, as it sits in a location that is surrounded by forests that are managed in a varied way, so as to provide excellent learning experiences for the forestry students of BOKU. As multidisciplinary teams, we will introduce the course participants to the various topics related to climate-smart forestry, and we will let them see with their own eyes how differences in forest management strategies make the forests more or less resilient to (climate) change. In addition, we will bring them into contact with various stakeholders, and allow them to collect necessary data that can help them to ultimately present scenarios for future forest management across diverse regions of Europe.

To enable the participants to really develop their skills in multidisciplinary research, and to ensure that they are coming up with robust and innovative solutions that can be extrapolated to other areas across Europe or the world, we will bring in a team of expert scientists from all over Europe. These will be people with expertise in forest ecology, but also experts from industry, economics, sociology, and policy. We will also organise excursions and interactions to and with local stakeholders.