The ability of forests to continue mitigating climate change depends on their ability to cope and adapt to global change drivers, such as more frequent climate extreme events and changes in atmospheric pollutants (namely carbon dioxide, reactive nitrogen and sulphur compounds). Different global change drivers could play a synergistic, antagonistic or predisposing role in affecting forest ecosystem functioning and health. All these drivers, however, are generally considered in isolation, and their effects on key processes (at tree, soil and ecosystem levels) are investigated separately in natural, periurban and urban (NPU) forests, thus leading to uneven, un-coordinated and scattered information among different research communities. Without taking a holistic view on forest’s responses to global change, the future trajectory of Europe’s forests and their climate change mitigation potential can be fundamentally mis-assessed.

CLEANFOREST will establish an inclusive and multidisciplinary pan-European network, which capitalizes on existing expertise and infrastructures (monitoring networks, manipulation experiments) to i) coordinate research efforts (e.g. data collection), ii) compare approaches and define common protocols to standardize measurements and methods used in global change studies, and iii) foster collaboration among different research groups to exchange and synthesize data, thus contributing to advancing scientific knowledge, identifying research gaps and providing suggestions for the next generation manipulation experiments and monitoring networks. Finally, CLEANFORST will benefit from the participation of key stakeholders (policymakers, small companies developing low-cost and effective instruments for environmental monitoring, citizen associations), by promoting mutual synergies to fulfil the urgent need of evidence-based solutions to policy, societal and technological challenges.