Deadline: September 21, 2025
The European Forest Institute is offering a grant opportunity aimed at enhancing forest monitoring to better understand the impact of climate change on forests by enabling near real-time data collection and analysis.
Focus areas include providing temporally resolved ecosystem-level information on the effects of climatic drivers on forest structure and function in near real-time, implementing novel measurement techniques at existing forest monitoring sites, establishing pilot monitoring plots linked to current networks, and contributing data to a pan-European ForestWard Observatory.
This grant supports projects that increase the potential of forest monitoring sites such as ICP Forests to assess climate and climatic extreme effects on tree and forest functioning through additional measurements including high-resolution dendrometer measurements of stem diameter and soil moisture, temperature and meteorological parameters. The goal is to capture tree water and carbon relations, provide data for nowcasting stress and growth impacts, and improve understanding of disturbances and carbon sequestration potentials.
Projects must aim to link new measurements to ground-based sensors for stress nowcasting and combine them with structural forest assessments using tree diameter and height measurements or advanced 3D point cloud technologies such as terrestrial laser scanning and UAV-based methods. Data integration within a wider ForestWard network and open near-real-time access is required, with plans for continuation beyond the project period.
Eligible applicants include legal entities or consortiums eligible under the EU Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program, excluding certain restricted entities. Proposals can request funding up to €145,000, starting early 2026 for up to 18 months, with continuation of data collection for at least three more years. Projects must define their geographic focus within North, Central, or South Europe biogeographic regions and justify spatial representativeness for scalability.
The grant application process mandates submission in English and adherence to formatting rules, with evaluation based on excellence and implementation quality. Funding will be disbursed in lump sum installments based on report approvals.
For more information, visit EFI.
