Biodiversity is currently one of the most prominent topics in forest policy discussions in Europe. There are discussions on how forest biodiversity can be maintained and enhanced in nowadays sustainable forest management (SFM). These discussions are not new, but require a refreshed angle towards balancing different demands on forests in an unstable world, and answers for integrative management in the future.
Already three decades ago, the forest sector, accustomed to integrating the complexity and long-time scale of forest ecosystems into its work, has developed tools for monitoring all aspects of sustainable forest management (SFM), notably the pan-European Criteria and Indicators (C&I) for Sustainable Forest Management. Since the first set of C&I for SFM in 1998 and its improvement in 2003 and a revision in 2015, experience has shown that C&I for SFM are a very important tool for national and European forest policy (Linser et al. 2018; Linser & Wolfslehner 2022; Lier et al. 2021) and the data collection and analysis systems which accompany them, regularly published in the State of Europe’s Forests reports.