The Life + SUBER project includes the following actions:
- Selection of the demonstration plots within 4 main areas of distribution of cork oak in Catalonia (Alt Empordà, Montseny-Guilleries, Gavarres, Montnegre-Corredor) and signing agreements with forest owners where will be held the forestry treatments.
- Initial diagnosis of the demonstration areas and drafting the technical specifications of the forestry activities.
- Implementation of innovative management models, and later technical description of these models through different forestry treatments, with 3 main targets:
- Improvement of the vitality of the cork oak and cork production: 16 plots, 64 ha
- Prevention of large wildfires, scale landscape: 8 plots, 32 ha
- Restoration of degraded cork oak: 4 plots, 12 ha
- Implementation of the biorracional control of the plague Coroebus undatus, real scale (15 plots, 120 ha).
- Development of management tools to integrate this adaptation to climate change in forest policy and Catalan cork subsector regulations, ensuring its future implementation on a larger scale.
- Detailed technical monitoring of the implemented actions (forestry treatments and mass trapping devices), allowing precise assessment of their environmental effects (improvement of parameters related to the forest vitality and good health status), economic and social. Monitoring will be based on permanent plots placed in the treated stands, and also in stands external to the project where the owner will implement a traditional management. Pre- and post-treatment measures will be carried out periodically during the duration of the project.
- Communication and dissemination actions, transfer of knowledge and technology, aimed to owners and managers of cork oak groves, technicians and administration, to incorporate the tools developed in policies and in society in general, local and international.
To do that, it is expected: website creation; design and editing of information leaflets, roll-ups, USB and information panels; organization of seminars (minimum 4 technical seminars) and conferences in sectorial congress; editing an informative video; writing articles and editing technical documents.
