With the aim of protecting forest heritage and strengthening the resilience of forests in southwestern Europe, COOPTREE intends to develop a transnational strategy for the knowledge and conservation of SUDOE’s forest genetic resources. This document, which establishes common objectives and a long-term vision, aims to be a point of convergence of the approaches of the different territories to the preservation and adaptation of the forests of the SUDOE. Building on the achievements of the project, both in terms of the knowledge that will have been centralised and the knowledge that will have been generated, this transnational strategy aims to lay the foundations of an expert network that lasts over time, identify the relevant levers of action and knowledge gaps, and serve as a basis for the target territories and actors, as a directly adopted strategy, or to feed their own strategies for forest conservation and adaptation. Without prejudging the elements that emerge throughout the project, the strategy developed jointly by the partners could consist of three components: — A section on the forest context and the strategic bases being carried out in the participating territories. — A section on the knowledge gathered, which derives from the capitalisation of the knowledge already available and the knowledge generated by the project (act. 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). — A section containing the strategic guidelines and their operational variants, which will specify the guidelines to be followed to preserve the forest resource (e.g. knowledge of genetic resources, conservation, diversification, enrichment, clearing, species substitution, etc.). The deliverables of the GT1 will feed into this realisation, as well as the outputs of the WG2 (pilot actions) will be able to illustrate some of the operational applications of the strategic guidelines developed.
