We offer a clearly defined research task on Historical Forest Baselines and Long-Term Resilience for an interdisciplinary FORESTPathways consortium.

Contemporary forest research can observe forest processes in great detail, but usually over relatively short time periods. We provide the missing deep-time perspective: empirical evidence of how forest ecosystems have actually changed, responded to disturbance and recovered over centuries and millennia.

We reconstruct forest dynamics across the temperate forest belt of Europe over the entire Holocene (approximately the last 11,000 years), using pollen, plant macroremains, anthracology, charcoal, phytoliths, non-pollen palynomorphs, stable isotopes and radiocarbon chronology.

Our research addresses:
• historical forest baselines and long-term variability;
• forest resilience and responses to repeated disturbance;
• human-mediated fire, grazing and woodland use;
• ecological legacies of past land use;
• forest heterogeneity, biodiversity and long-term trajectories;
• distinguishing human-driven change from climate and other environmental drivers.

We can lead or co-lead a defined research task within a larger work package. Our contribution can provide long-term trajectories, historical reference states and empirical constraints for contemporary forest ecology, modelling and adaptive management.

We are not proposing the past as a blueprint for future forests. Rather, we use the long-term record to test assumptions about resilience, disturbance, biodiversity and management targets.

Our ideal consortium already addresses adaptive, multifunctional or close-to-nature forest management, forest resilience, biodiversity or forest responses to environmental change, but lacks long-term empirical evidence on how forest systems have actually behaved in the past.

We are particularly interested in coordinators and partners working on:
• forest ecology, resilience and biodiversity;
• adaptive and multifunctional forestry;
• forest and landscape modelling;
• climate, fire and disturbance dynamics;
• restoration and conservation;
• management scenarios and decision support.

We are open to joining an existing consortium or helping shape a new project concept around this interface between long-term ecological evidence and future forest management.

The Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Palaeoecology (LAPE) at the Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, specialises in reconstructing long-term ecosystem dynamics and human–environment interactions.

We combine palaeoecological, archaeobotanical and environmental archaeological approaches to investigate how vegetation, disturbance regimes, biodiversity and human land use have changed over centuries and millennia.

Our particular strength for FORESTPathways is the integration of multi-proxy palaeoecological evidence into long-term reconstructions of forest dynamics, providing historical baselines that can complement contemporary ecology, modelling and forest-management research.

Our distinctive contribution is the connection between timescales.

Contemporary forest research can tell us in detail how forests behave today. We can show how forest ecosystems have actually varied, responded to disturbance and recovered over the last 11,000 years.

This allows a consortium to move beyond shifting baselines and ask a more fundamental question:

How resilient have European forests actually been over the long term?

We can turn this evidence into a defined research task that connects palaeoecological trajectories with contemporary forest ecology, modelling and future-oriented management.