SUPERB pursues the overall goal to create a lasting enabling environment for transformative change towards large-scale forest and forest landscape restoration, which empowers decision makers to take just and informed decisions for restoration of biodiversity, ecosystem services and carbon sequestration in a manner that minimises region specific trade-offs and maximises synergies between ecosystem services. SUPERB develops and synthesises a multidisciplinary, practical, and scientific restoration knowledge basis and makes it publicly available. In 12 large-scale demonstrators across Europe, we will showcase best practices responding to key forest restoration and adaptation challenges on some hundreds of hectares per demo and with the potential for immediate upscaling to over one million hectares in 10-15 years. For large scale restoration to be successful, many actors from different sectors and disciplines must behave synergistically and in a mutually reinforcing way. We will speed up transformative change and further upscaling through innovative stakeholder involvement across scales to ensure the favorability and uptake of the proposed approaches. A comprehensive multi-language online Forest Ecosystem Restoration Gateway will guide stakeholders to find answers to their restoration questions, advise them on how to deal with barriers and enablers and provide access to easily applicable and comprehensible tools and materials that support restoration, e.g., best practices for forest restoration or the development of scalability plans, a tree species selection application, an innovative funding guide, and much more. The Gateway will also host a restoration Marketplace, where market agents, e.g. potential funders and landowners, can agree on bids for restoration projects. SUPERB will boost and measure its impact through its extensive and systematically enlarged stakeholder communities and networks, to ensure the relevance of the project outputs and their positive uptake.

The preserving of the genetic diversity of the forest types is the basis for sustainable management and conservation of the natural composition of the forests. Natural forests make up 95% of the total forests in Croatia and in its wealth geographic region contains different ecological types and a large number of the forest tree species. Global climate changes, rising temperatures, falling rainfall, occurrence of the extreme weather events directly affect on genetic diversity. The main objective of the proposed project is to make recommendations for the conservation of the genetic diversity of the forest trees. Precondition for achieving the goal is the identification and understanding of the genetic variability of the individual tree species. The research to be carried out by the project would be based on the common oak and beech. On existing genetic tests that were established at different sites, data on the survival and growth of plants, phenology, silvicultural properties, plant resistance to pests, etc should be collect. The stem forest stands from which the seed was taken will be used for collecting the data of health condition, fruiting and climatic parameters. The genetic diversity of the provenance will be analyzed by DNA markers. This project should be continued and expanded research on the identification of proven European beech resistant to drought, which are conducted in the framework of a bilateral cooperation with Germany (MSES-DAAD 2013/14) and the preservation of the gene pool and study of the variability of our most important tree species which are conducted as part of the project “Breeding and forest seed” supported by MSES of Croatia. From the economic point of view, the project aims is to raise the category of the forest reproductive material (FRM) in a higher category according to the Law of FRM (Official Gazette 75/2009, 61 /2011 - EU directive EC/105/99). Higher category guarantees a higher quality, and thus a higher price in the market.