FORET EXIL: For the past two decades, intensive logging in the old forests of the Carpathian Mountains, renowned for their high naturalness, has been a challenge to the Romanian government and the international community. Indeed, these European forests, which are indispensable for maintaining a unique biological and cultural biodiversity, also offer ecosystem services for adapting to global changes that are still undervalued. While studies are multiplying to show the extent of forest removals, few have looked back at the retrospective study of Holocene changes in forest cover and the socio-environmental processes that led to the current state. Yet only their understanding can make it possible and efficient to predict future changes with a view to their preservation and sustainable management. Faced with the urgency of the situation, the project brought together a large interdisciplinary consortium of French and Romanian researchers to rapidly deliver a diagnosis of their state and their perception by local populations as well as a precise assessment of their vulnerabilities.

SAFE NATURE: The Eastern Carpathian’s secular forests, the green lung of Europe, are currently surrounded by clear-cutting leading to eroding ecosystems and biodiversity and impeding traditional uses and the ecosystem services to the people. The high temporal resolution multi-proxies (pollens, charcoal, heavy metals) study of sedimentary sequences from the Taul Rosia peat lands will offer an unique opportunity to characterise the long-term history of human-forest interactions at the scale of the metalliferous region of Baiut (Judet Maramures). This study should help establish an emergency plan for the protection, management and enhancement of these high heritage value forests.

URGENSES: This complementary project UrgenSES mobilizes innovative technologies to characterize the forest biodiversity of the studied stands (internal structure of forest stands, taxonomic biodiversity):
1- the contribution of LiDAR spatial data for the detection of biodiversity factors in the forest environment.
2- the contribution of molecular tools for taxonomic identification that are adapted to punctual sampling over time and offer the possibility of jointly analysing a large number of taxonomic groups.