Marcus Lindner

Marcus Lindner
European Forest Institute | EFI

PhD in Geoecology (University Potsdam, Germany), Forest Science Diploma (Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany)

About

258
Publications
140,684
Reads
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18,150
Citations
Introduction
I hold a degree in forest sciences from University of Freiburg and a PhD in Geoecology from University of Potsdam. I have 30 years of experience in research on climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation strategies in forest management, forest sector sustainability, forest resource assessments and ecosystem service provisioning from European forests. @marlind.bsky.social https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-lindner-efi/
Additional affiliations
April 2017 - December 2022
European Forest Institute
Position
  • Principle Scientist
Description
  • Principle Scientist in the Resilience Programme at the European Forest Institute Office in Bonn, Germany. Coordinating the Horizon 2020 project RESONATE (Resilient forest value chains – enhancing resilience through natural and socio-economic responses) with 20 partners across Europe. Other major past and ongoing projects include ATEAM, BEE, CARBOINVENT, CASTLE, EFORWOOD, EUwood, GenTREE, I-Maestro, MOTIVE, Northern ToSIA, OPERAs, S2BIOM, SENSOR, Silvistrat, SUPERB, SURE, VOLANTE.
January 2023 - present
European Forest Institute
Position
  • Head of Resilience Programme
Description
  • Head of the Resilience Programme at the European Forest Institute Office in Bonn, Germany. I am coordinating the Horizon 2020 project RESONATE (Resilient forest value chains – enhancing resilience through natural and socio-economic responses) with 20 partners across Europe. Other major past and ongoing projects include ATEAM, BEE, CARBOINVENT, CASTLE, EFORWOOD, EUwood, ForestPaths, GenTREE, I-Maestro, MOTIVE, Northern ToSIA, OPERAs, S2BIOM, SENSOR, Silvistrat, SUPERB, SURE, VOLANTE.
April 2003 - February 2017
European Forest Institute
Position
  • Head of Programme
Description
  • Leading Research Programme with annually 10-20 ongoing projects. Supervising team of 10-15 team members. Major projects EFORWOOD, CASTLE, Northern ToSIA, BEE, EUwood, MOTIVE, OPERAS, SENSOR, VOLANTE.

Publications

Publications (258)
Book
Full-text available
Primary and old-growth forests in the EU are extremely rare and threatened, yet play an irreplaceable role in biodiversity conservation and the provision of other ecosystem services such as carbon storage. Recognising this, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 sets the target to strictly protect all remaining primary and old-growth forests. This t...
Article
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Purpose of Review Outbreaks of tree-killing bark beetles have reached unprecedented levels in conifer forests in the northern hemisphere and are expected to further intensify due to climate change. In parts of Europe, bark beetle outbreaks and efforts to manage them have even triggered social unrests and political instability. These events have inc...
Article
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Over the last decades, the natural disturbance is increasingly putting pressure on European forests. Shifts in disturbance regimes may compromise forest functioning and the continuous provisioning of ecosystem services to society, including their climate change mitigation potential. Although forests are central to many European policies, we lack th...
Article
Against a background of intensifying climate-induced disturbances, the need to enhance the resilience of forests and forest management is gaining urgency. In forest management, multiple trade-offs exist between different demands as well as across and within temporal and spatial scales. However, methods to assess resilience that consider these trade...
Article
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Resilience is commonly addressed when dealing with the sustainable planning and management of social–ecological systems, but we lack a unified framework for its quantitative assessment and application. We present an operational resilience framework (ORF) based on recognizing and relating several elements: system variables (e.g., ecosystem services)...
Article
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Climate change-associated disturbances such as storms, wildfires, and pest outbreaks increasingly destabilize forest systems, threatening their ecological, economic, and social functions. These disruptions impact the forest value chain (FVC) by causing fluctuations in timber supply, from a quantity and quality perspective. This study employed the o...
Article
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Purpose of review We are amid a historical momentum encouraging forest restoration, yet the translation of ambitious targets into reality is hindered by poor documentation and understanding of the success and failure of past restoration efforts. This review aims to evaluate the ecological, social, political and economic characteristics of forest re...
Technical Report
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In dieser Stellungnahme ordnet der Wissenschaftliche Beirat für Waldpolitik die Ergebnisse der Bundeswaldinventur (BWI) 2022 in Bezug auf vier zentrale Handlungsfelder ein (1. Biodiversität und Waldnaturschutz, 2. Klimaschutzfunktion, Resilienz und Anpassungsfähigkeit an den Klimawandel, 3. Eigentum, Arbeit, Einkommen, 4. Rohstoffe, Verwendung und...
Technical Report
Full-text available
In dieser Kurzstellungnahme argumentiert der Wissenschaftlichen Beirat für Waldpolitik (WBW), dass die große Herausforderung der Anpassung der Wälder und der Waldwirtschaft an den globalen Wandel einer starken Unterstützung durch Forschung bedarf um effektive und effiziente Anpassungen zu ermöglichen und um Belastungen zukünftiger Generationen durc...
Article
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The world is currently facing uncertainty caused by environmental, social, and economic changes and by political shocks. Fostering social-ecological resilience by enhancing forests’ ability to provide a range of ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration, habitat provision, and sustainable livelihoods, is key to addressing such uncertainty....
Article
Climate change alters the operational environment of forest management. The need to increase forest resilience and manage forests based on the best available knowledge is urgent. However, it is unclear to what extent scientific knowledge is integrated into practical forest management guidance. To explore how the integration of research works in for...
Article
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Alte, naturnahe Laubwälder stehen zunehmend im Fokus der europäischen und nationalen Wald-politik. Sie haben eine besondere Bedeutung für den Schutz der biologischen Vielfalt und es wird häufig angenommen, dass sie einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Klimaschutz leisten und über eine hohe Anpassungsfähigkeit im Klimawandel verfügen. Vor diesem Hintergrund...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Old, near-natural deciduous forests are ever more in the focus of European and national forest policy. They are of particular importance for biodiversity protection, and it is often assumed that they contribute significantly to climate protection and are highly adaptable to climate change. Against this background, important forest-related policies...
Article
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Warmer and drier conditions increase forest mortality worldwide. At the same time, nitrogen deposition, longer growing seasons and higher atmospheric CO 2 concentrations may increase site productivity accelerating forest growth. However, tree physiological studies suggest that increased site productivity can also have adverse effects , reducing ada...
Article
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Climate change poses a major challenge for forest management in Europe. Understanding how forestry professionals perceive climate change is critical to inform decision-making on climate change adaptation. The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of forestry professionals regarding climate change and its effects on forests, as well as th...
Article
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Zusammenfassung. Um Wälder und ihre Ökosystemleistungen auch unter den Bedingungen des globalen Wandels zu erhalten und nachhaltig nutzen zu können, wird im Kontext der geplanten Novellierung des Bundeswaldgesetzes unter dem Begriff der Guten fachlichen Praxis (GfP) die Konkretisierung von Mindeststandards für die Waldwirtschaft diskutiert. Dies t...
Article
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Forest management practices might act as nature-based methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow anthropogenic climate change and thus support an EU forest-based climate change mitigation strategy. However, the extent to which diversified management actions could lead to quantitatively important changes in carbon sequestration and stocking...
Book
Full-text available
The goal of adapting forests to climate change should be the provision of the manifold ecosystem services of forests for current and future generations. This requires transforming not only forests themselves, but also enterprises, institutions, and our use of ecosystem services. In most cases, because of the rapid pace of climate change, this can o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Forest management practices might act as nature-based methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow anthropogenic climate change and thus support an EU forest-based climate change mitigation strategy. However, the extent to which diversified management actions could lead to quantitatively important changes in carbon sequestration and stocking...
Article
Full-text available
Forests play a key role in a bio-based economy by providing renewable materials, mitigating climate change, and accommodating biodiversity. However, forests experience massive increases in stresses in their ecological and socioeconomic environments, threatening forest ecosystem services supply. Alleviating those stresses is hampered by conflicting...
Article
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Heatwaves exert disproportionately strong and sometimes irreversible impacts on forest ecosystems. These impacts remain poorly understood at the tree and species level and across large spatial scales. Here, we investigate the effects of the record-breaking 2018 European heatwave on tree growth and tree water status using a collection of high-tempor...
Book
Full-text available
Der Klimawandel verändert unsere Wälder auf vielfältige Weise. Dabei werden negative Auswirkungen auf die Wälder, ihre Ökosystemleistungen und die Waldwirtschaft höchstwahrscheinlich überwiegen. Neben dem Anstieg der Temperatur und Änderung der Niederschlagsverteilung sind es vor allem die Zunahme von Extremereignissen und ihren Interaktionen, die...
Article
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General Context: Climate change can positively or negatively affect abiotic and biotic drivers of tree mortality. Process-based models integrating these climatic effects are only seldom used at species distribution scale. Objective: The main objective of this study was to investigate the multi-causal mortality risk of five major European forest tre...
Article
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The aim of this study is to assess the potential of Earth Observation and climate data for the forestry sector focusing on the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Although forestry researchers recognize the importance of Earth Observation and climate data, forestry practitioners currently work mainly with land cover information, largely neglec...
Article
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Ceccherini et al.1 reported an abrupt increase in harvested forest—in terms of both biomass and area—in Europe from 2016, and suggested that this reflected expanding wood markets encouraged by the bioec- onomy policies of the European Union (EU). They used Global Forest Watch2 and GlobBiomass3 data together with an analysis that sought to remove na...
Article
The translation of genetic gains into economic gains is important for evaluating the impact of using genetically improved forest reproductive material (FRM) in the forest sector. However, few studies based on European forests have been published to date. Here, we analyse the stand-level wood production and financial performance of planting genetica...
Article
Full-text available
Managing genetic diversity is of key importance in fostering resilience of forest ecosystems to climate change. We carried out a survey reaching over 200 forest owners and managers from 15 European countries to understand their perceptions of the main threats to forest ecosystems, their knowledge of forest genetic resources (FGR) and their attitude...
Article
There is growing concern that the implementation of political agreements on climate change and biodiversity will not be enough to protect forests in the short run and up to the end of the 21st century. As mitigation efforts are lagging behind self-imposed, reasonable targets, genetic diversity will have a large and significant part to play in the p...
Book
The key aim of this report is to show how the forest sector can help the Russian Federation to meet its Paris Agreement targets and, at the same time, how the sector can contribute to improve the economy. This is linked to building an innovative strategy of sustainable forest management, addressing conservation as well as productivity, emphasizing...
Chapter
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This chapter shows a synthesis of the past, present and future of climate change in the Russian Federation on a physical and geographical basis. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the analysis of the impacts of changes in the physical climate on the forest sector.
Chapter
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We present different definitions of forest resilience and discuss how this concept can be used to guide forest management under a changing climate. Forest resilience can be seen as an overarching concept of nested hierarchies, with engineering resilience being nested inside ecological resilience, which in turn is nested inside social-ecological res...
Article
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The process-based model 4C (FORESEE) has been developed over the past 20 years to study climate impacts on forests and is now freely available as an open-source tool. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive description of this 4C version (v2.2) for scientific users of the model and to present an evaluation of 4C at four different...
Article
Full-text available
Primary forests are critical for forest biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services. In Europe, these forests are particularly scarce and it is unclear whether they are sufficiently protected. Here we aim to: (a) understand whether extant primary forests are representative of the range of naturally occurring forest types, (b) identify forest ty...
Book
Full-text available
The publication is focussed on integration of climate change adaptation measures to sustainable forest management in Europe. It has been prepared and published in the framework of FOREST EUROPE Work Programme 2016–2020. Part I of the publication (policy recommendations) has been developed by the FOREST EUROPE Expert Group on Adaptation of Forests t...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose of Review Resilience is a key concept to deal with an uncertain future in forestry. In recent years, it has received increasing attention from both research and practice. However, a common understanding of what resilience means in a forestry context and how to operationalise it is lacking. Here, we conducted a systematic review of the recen...
Article
Integrated forest management (IFM) can help reconcile critical trade-offs between goals in forest management, such as nature conservation and biomass production. The challenge of IFM is dealing with these trade-offs at the level of practical forest management, such as striving for compromises between biomass extraction and habitat retention. This p...
Article
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Background European forests are considered a crucial resource for supplying biomass to a growing bio-economy in Europe. This study aimed to assess the potential availability of forest biomass from European forests and its spatial distribution. We tried to answer the questions (i) how is the potential forest biomass availability spatially distribute...
Technical Report
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The aim of this study is to help build a knowledge base for the review of the EU Forest Strategy that was adopted by the European Commission in 2013. The EU Forest Strategy addresses 8 priority areas that were identified as being particularly relevant for forests and the forest-based sector until 2020. These priority areas address: (i) support of r...
Article
Bio-economy can be defined as an economy where renewable biomasses are produced and converted into value-added materials, chemicals, foods, feeds, fuels and energy: therefore, it represents one valid, reliable way to transition to equitable, sustainable, post fossil-carbon societies. For this reason, it is increasingly gaining attention by scientis...
Article
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Aim Primary forests have high conservation value but are rare in Europe due to historic land use. Yet many primary forest patches remain unmapped, and it is unclear to what extent they are effectively protected. Our aim was to (1) compile the most comprehensive European‐scale map of currently known primary forests, (2) analyse the spatial determina...
Article
Sustainably managed forests provide renewable raw material that can be used for primary/secondary conversion products and as biomass for energy generation. The potentially available amounts of timber, which are still lower than annual increments, have been published earlier. Access to this timber can be challenging for small-dimensioned assortments...
Article
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Plausible scenarios of future land use derived from model projections may differ substantially from what is actually desired by society, and identifying such mismatches is important for identifying policies to resolve them. This paper presents an approach to link explorative projections of future land use for the European Union to normative visions...
Article
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Protection of natural or semi-natural ecosystems is an important part of societal strategies for maintaining biodiversity, ecosystem services, and achieving overall sustainable development. The assessment of multiple emerging land use trade-offs is complicated by the fact that land use changes occur and have consequences at local, regional, and eve...
Research
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There is heated debate about the best way to realize the potential of our forests in the fight against climate change. In the EU, the debate is currently very much focused on questioning the use of forest biomass to produce bioenergy. Our view is that bioenergy from sustainably managed forests can contribute positively to climate change mitigation.
Article
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Adapting the management of forest resources to climate change involves addressing several crucial aspects to provide a valid basis for decision making. These include the knowledge and belief of decision makers, the mapping of management options for the current as well as anticipated future bioclimatic and socioeconomic conditions, and the ways deci...
Article
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In July 2016, the European Commission (EC) published a legislative proposal for incorporating greenhouse gas emissions and removals due to Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) into its 2030 Climate and Energy Framework. The Climate and Energy Framework aims at a total emission reduction of 40% by 2030 for all sectors together as part of...
Technical Report
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Research and Innovation (R&I) plays a central role in developing advanced biofuels technologies to help achieve the EU’s climate and energy targets. This study examines the R&I potential for feedstock production, advanced biofuels production, and use of advanced biofuels. The study quantifies R&I potential under future scenarios where EU targets ar...
Article
Moving towards a bioeconomy is one of the key policy strategies of the European Union (EU). Sustainable production of renewable resources is essential to produce the feedstock that can be converted into value-added products, such as food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy. We require improved tools and assessment methodologies to ensure that t...
Chapter
Lignocellulosic biomass from forests and forest industries represents a crucial resource for the bioeconomy. Many assessments have been carried out over the last decade to quantify biomass potentials from forests and forest industries. The results from these assessments are quite diverse because of varying definitions and assumptions. Here we repor...
Article
The aim of this study was to analyse the sustainability impacts of allocating material from energy use to material use by adding cascaded wood into production of wood products. A case study is presented, where we analyse sustainability impacts of cascade use alternatives compared to the non-cascade use practice in particleboard production within th...
Article
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Climate change and transition towards a bioeconomy are seen as both challenges and opportunities for the forest-based sector in Europe. Transition towards a bioeconomy will in most cases rely on intensified use of renewable resources and/or advancement in technology. However, how can the intensified use of renewable resources be combined with clima...
Article
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Recent studies projecting future climate change impacts on forests mainly consider either the effects of climate change on productivity or on disturbances. However, productivity and disturbances are intrinsically linked because 1) disturbances directly affect forest productivity (e.g. via a reduction in leaf area, growing stock or resource-use effi...
Article
The study describes how qualitative stakeholder feedback can be used in quantitative scenarios to simulate forest resource use under alternative management objectives. In earlier studies in the region of eastern Finland, stakeholders did not see a possible conflict between increased bioenergy use and nature conservation; this finding is contrary to...
Article
Two key international policy processes have been developed to combat illegal logging and promote the contribution of forests to climate change mitigation in developing countries: the European Union's Action Plan on Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) and its Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs), and the United Nations Framework...
Article
Increasing the amount of carbon stored in harvested wood products (HWPs) is an internationally recognized measure to mitigate climate change. Several approaches and tiers of methods may be used to analyze the contribution of HWP in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and removals at a regional and national level. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climat...
Research
Full-text available
ThinkForest Brief: A summary of the report "Forest biomass, carbon neutrality and climate change mitigation" published by the European Forest Institute (EFI). Available at: www.efi.int/portal/policy_advice/publications/from_science_ to_policy/fstp3/
Book
Full-text available
The Paris Agreement and the EU Climate and Energy Framework set ambitious but necessary targets. Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by phasing out the technologies and infrastructures that cause fossil carbon emissions is one of today’s most important challenges. In the EU, bioenergy is currently the largest renewable energy source used. Most...