Design of a Decision Support System for innovative forest management in small scale private ownership. – NEOSILVA

Forest management is currently disturbed by major contemporary crises (climate, biodiversity, relocalization and globalization, bioeconomy, etc.) that challeng silvicultural practices (Achim et al. 2022, Le Bouler 2021). All forest management operators are expressing a need for innovation supported by scientific knowledge, with one priority: adaptation to climate change. In this context, UMR SILVA is developing interdisciplinary research on the functioning and management of forests faced with the challenges of global change. To meet the specific needs of small private forests, NEOSYLVA INVESTISSEMENT FORESTIER (NIF) offers services for restoring management in small private forests, with an innovative business model based on a partnership between owner, manager and investors.

The NEOSILVA joint laboratory between NIF and UMR Silva aims to set up R&D adapted to the management of small private forests (less than 25 ha) facing the multiple challenges of sustainable management threatened by climate change. These small forests are currently finding it difficult to enter R&D projects and networks, which are not tailored to their needs.
NEOSILVA aims to back up NIF's innovative business model with a methodology for implementing innovative silviculture, highly sustainable in terms of both environmental services and wood production, adapted to the expectations and capacities of private forest owners and managers, and designed using scientific approaches. The deliverable is a multi-criteria decision support system, covering the three stages of management: diagnosis prior to handing over to management, definition of silvicultural trajectories, monitoring of operations and forest dynamics during the management plan, in the framework of adaptive and learning management.

The joint laboratory's work program is based on UMR SILVA's Forest' Inn Lab group research on innovation systems. This research applies scientific and reflexive methodologies derived from the theories of open and user-centered innovation "livinglab" to build the deliverable. This research will then stimulate an interdisciplinary approach within UMR SILVA, with all its scientific expertise in pedology, ecology, ecophysiology, silviculture, forest growth simulation and ecosystem service evaluation, to co-design the various components of the multi-criteria decision support tool, based on the needs of forest managers. This process of co-construction between actors with different knowledge and points of view is the main element of the research and is analyzed as a research object. The program is being developed in two areas (one in the Western and one in the Eastern France) of very different forestry histories and cultures, to support the genericity of the deliverable and its interest as a scientific production.

At the end of the project, the partnership will continue this research on open and user-centered innovation applied to forest management, but it will also amplify the transfer to management of the latest advances in research in ecology, silviculture and other forest sciences, with a better understanding of the needs of stakeholders. In the longer term, it will lead to joint R&D in silviculture based on the monitoring of long-term experiments (over 10 years), which should be included in the In-SYLVA France national research infrastructure.