The supply of forest services and products is largely determined by forest management. Decision makers thus need models and tools that may help assess the short and long term impacts of management options on the forest resource base. The biological processes and the temporal and spatial scales involved complicate this assessment. Socioeconomic and climate change as well as the possibility of catastrophic events further complicate it as they lead to a decision-making context characterized by risk and uncertainty. Designing adequate forest decision support models and tools is a thus a very complex task.

The European and the American experiences with the development and application of models and tools to support forest management provides a solid foundation for continuous improvement of its efficiency and effectiveness in a context of global change that calls for adaptive approaches. It further suggests networking and research needs to pursue that improvement. This provided the rationale for a project that might strengthen research collaboration through active networking and staff exchange activities between four European organisations from Portugal, Finland, Spain and Sweden, and five American organisations from Chile, Brazil and USA that are leaders in this field. These organisations represent different disciplines (e.g. environmental science, forest inventory and modelling, operations research and software engineering). The project will contribute to a consistent worldwide quality reference for the development of tools that may be used by public administrators, forest owners, industry and non-governmental organisations for enhanced integration of adaptive strategies in forest management planning. Expertise of the partners involved in this proposal is key to achieve the objectives of the ForEAdapt programme.