Prague, April 27, 2026 – After years of drought, bark beetle infestations, and increasing climate extremes, it is no longer enough to “simply” plant more trees. The SUPERB project has initiated forest restoration across nearly 1.5 million hectares of land and delivered results that are transforming approaches to forest restoration across Europe. Thirty-eight European organizations and institutions, including the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague (FLD CZU) participated in the project, which was funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program. The consortium jointly tested and shared best practices for forest restoration.
“The outputs of the SUPERB project are not some abstract strategy, but concrete examples from 12 extensive demonstration sites covering a total area of 4,550 ha spread across Europe and supplemented by 50 km of newly established linear landscape features. These sites demonstrate how to address the challenges of degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss. They represent various types of forest ecosystems, ranging from northern pine and mixed forests to Central European and Mediterranean stands. “These include, for example, forests in Scotland, but also in the Vysočina region,” says professor Róbert Marušák, dean of the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences at the Czech University of Life Sciences.
“One of the key outcomes of the project is the multilingual online platform Forest Knowledge Gateway, which compiles scientific findings, practical guidelines, economic and financial tools, monitoring methodologies, and decision-making guides for forest restoration. This digital tool helps forest owners, foresters, investors, and government agencies find specific guidance for successful forest restoration in their region,” explains professor Miroslav Svoboda, a leading expert on this topic from the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences at the Czech University of Life Sciences. “The set of outputs also includes an interactive tool that enables the matching of supply and demand for financing or the implementation of forest restoration activities,” he adds.
The SUPERB project is having a concrete impact in the Czech Republic as well. CZU in Prague, in cooperation with the Forest of the Czech Republic, s. p.; the Military Forests and Estates of the Czech Republic, s. p., and the company Kinský Žďár, a. s., was responsible for three demonstration sites in the Vysočina region and northern Moravia. Over 100 hectares of forest land and 8 newly constructed ponds were thus part of a European network where forest ecosystem restoration and adaptation practices were tested and shared in the field.
SUPERB also opened up opportunities for public and media engagement on the topic of forest restoration. The project investigated what the public knows about forest restoration and how they perceive it, and used this social data to improve communication and foster broad acceptance of measures within local communities and across Europe.
This project received funding from the European Union under the Horizon 2020 program for research and innovation under grant agreement No. 101036849.
