One framework, many forests: Integrative Forest Management as a shared language for Europe? 

by Shanqing Gao & Valentina Vitali

Forests in Europe are at a crossroads. Climate change is reshaping disturbance regimes, biodiversity is declining, and societies are demanding more from forests than ever before: timber, carbon storage, clean water, recreation and habitat for wildlife, all at once. Against this backdrop, forest managers are navigating a crowded landscape of concepts, frameworks and acronyms, each offering a different answer to the same fundamental question: What does it actually mean in practice to manage a forest well – that is, to provide the services societies need while at the same time strengthening the forests’ resilience and preparing them for the future? 

A new paper “Perspective: Managing European forests for biodiversity conservation and global change adaptation: An assessment of current management concepts” published in Forest Ecology and Management by Valentina Vitali and colleagues (2026), developed within the TRANSFORMIT project, takes a step back to make sense of this complexity and offers a structured way forward. 

Forest management concepts have multiplied over the past decades. Some of these names you might have heard before: Close-to-Nature Forest Management, Continuous Cover Forestry, Climate-Smart Forestry, Retention Forestry… But as noted in the paper, many of these approaches have remained “largely at the stand scale, even for ecosystem services that inherently depend on landscape-level processes”. Biodiversity elements, such as deadwood, habitat trees and rare species were frequently overlooked. Landscape connectivity was rarely part of the conversation. 

Today, the pressures are sharper, and the expectations are higher. EU policies on climate, biodiversity and the bioeconomy pull forests in multiple directions at once. Intensive management can reduce adaptive capacity by simplifying stand structures and shortening rotation lengths. Meanwhile, research consistently shows that structurally diverse, species-rich forests are far better buffered against the more frequent and more severe natural disturbances caused by climate change. 

What has been missing is not more concepts but more operational clarity. Many existing frameworks “articulate clear aspirations and guiding principles but lack fully developed, standardized operational guidelines”. Without that clarity, forest management approaches face the risk of remaining theoretical but having limited real-world impact on forests. 

IFM is not a new idea. First conceptualized by Daniel Kraus and Frank Krumm in 2013 and further developed since, it has long been understood as a holistic approach that aims to integrate nature conservation and adaptation to global change into sustainable forest management. Within TRANSFORMIT, we refined and operationalized it into a working definition: 

“Integrative Forest Management aims at integrating biodiversity conservation and global change adaptation into forest management for the sustainable provision of multiple ecosystem services. It is guided by natural and diverse forest structures, compositions, and dynamics to support ecosystem functioning and resilience. Its management practices consistently consider the tree, stand, and landscape scale and employ different silvicultural intensities, including intentionally unmanaged forest patches.” 

In short, IFM is not a prescription for what a forest must look like. It is a framework that can be adapted to local ecological realities, management traditions and governance contexts, while keeping biodiversity and resilience at the center. 

In practical terms, this definition is structured around 8 guiding principles: 

	Principle	What it means in practice
1	Retention of habitat trees, special habitats, and deadwood	Actively identifying, mapping, and retaining old trees, deadwood, and valuable habitats, not just what regulation requires, but beyond it
2	Promoting site-adapted native tree species	Prioritising native species suited to local conditions, while allowing climate-adapted non-native species in minority shares
3	Promoting natural tree regeneration	Favouring natural regeneration where possible, monitoring herbivore pressure, and protecting pioneer species in the landscape
4	Partial harvest and structural heterogeneity	Favouring selection harvesting over clear felling to maintain complex, uneven-aged stand structures
5	Promoting tree species variation and genetic diversity	Actively managing for diverse species mixtures aiming for a minimum of three tree species per stand and diverse provenances
6	Avoidance of intensive management operations	Limiting agrochemical use, constraining machine traffic to fixed extraction networks, retaining deadwood after salvage logging, and protecting watercourses
7	Supporting landscape heterogeneity and functioning	Planning explicitly for habitat connectivity, protection of rare habitats, and linkages between forested and non-forested areas at the landscape scale
8	Managing factors that hinder ecosystem functioning	Actively controlling invasive species and integrating natural disturbance processes, such as fire, storms, pest outbreaks, into management planning to build resilience

With this framework established, the paper undertakes a structured comparison of eight widely used European forest management concepts: Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), Close-to-Nature Forest Management (CNFM), ProSilva, the Stepping Stone Concept (SSC), Retention Forestry (RF), TRIAD, Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF), and Closer-to-Nature Forest Management (CerNFM). 

As shown in the graph below, all eight concepts show some degree of alignment with IFM principles, at the level of broad principles, most cover at least half. But when assessed against the more specific operational attributes – the how, not just the what – the picture shifts considerably: existing concepts cover less than 40% of IFM’s desired attributes overall. 

It is worth noting that this is not a ranking. Each concept has strengths that reflect its own origins and context. The more productive insight is that these concepts are complementary. IFM, as a common framework, makes that complementarity visible and actionable. As the paper puts it, by using IFM as a benchmark, the study helps “close gaps between high-level management goals and their practical implementation” through “a transparent dialogue between science, practice, and policy”. 

To show what IFM implementation can look like over time, the paper includes an illustrative transition pathway for disturbance-prone Norway spruce monocultures affected by drought and bark beetles. It emphasizes that some benefits (e.g., using existing deadwood as habitat) can start immediately, while others (e.g., developing habitat trees or achieving structurally diverse mixed stands) take decades, requiring staged planning across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons (Figure 3). 

Integrative Forest Management will not manage the beech forests in central Europe and the boreal pinewoods in Scandinavia with the same approaches. Regional conditions, traditions, ownership structures and governance frameworks all shape what is possible. This context-sensitivity is exactly the key feature of the framework. IFM is, as the paper describes it, “a unifying but non-prescriptive concept that is capable of integrating diverse forest management objectives”. 

What it offers, above all, is a shared language: a structured way to have better conversations about forest management across scientific, policy and practitioner communities, and to identify honestly where existing approaches are strong and where the gaps remain. 

Within TRANSFORMIT, we are building on this foundation by developing indicators for IFM, testing implementation pathways via 7 Living Labs and over 30 Satellite Demonstration Areas across Europe, and working through networks like the Integrate Network, with its more than 200 demonstration sites across Europe, to connect science and practice in ways that can scale.  

The forests of Europe are facing pressures that will not wait. But with clearer thinking about what we are managing them for, and better tools for translating that thinking into action, we can manage them considerably better. 

Read more: Valentina Vitali (lead-author), Frank Krumm, Andreea Spinu, Florian Schnabel, Jürgen Bauhus, Agata Konczal, Lorenz Schimetka, Sebastian Schwegmann, Georg Winkel, & Andreas Rigling. (2026). Managing European forests for biodiversity conservation and global change adaptation: An assessment of current management concepts. Forest Ecology and Management, 611, 123698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2026.123698  

• Category: News, Ecosystem services
• Tag: Biodiversity, Forest Management, forest practice, Integrative Forest Management