The origin of the ICP Forests Scientific Committee and Scientific Conferences
The Scientific Committee has been responsible for the scientific organization of the ICP Forests Scientific Conferences since 2012.
The first proposal for developing a scientific evaluation strategy for the ICP Forests was launched by current ICP Forests Chairman Marco Ferretti at the Programme Co-ordinating Meeting held in Rome, Italy, in 2010. In 2011, Marco Ferretti, Matthias Dobbertin, Karin Hansen, Pasi Rautio, and Walter Seidling met for an internal meeting in Florence, Italy, to
- discuss possibilities for a more organized evaluation and publication strategy;
- promote the value of the ICP Forests data in the scientific area; and by doing so
- increase their appeal and make the ICP Forests an acknowledged, reputed and important scientific partner for any forest monitoring and research initiative in Europe.
At the end, a discussion paper was produced (Ferretti et al., 2011: Towards an organized scientific evaluation and publication process within the ICP Forests) envisioning the publication process and outputs of ICP Forests for the forthcoming years and explicitly mentioned journals like “Nature” and “Science” as ultimate targets for the process. After approvals from the 27th Task Force Meeting of ICP Forests in 2011, the Scientific Evaluation Committee was installed and renamed in 2017 in Scientific Committee.
Chairs and Co-Chairs of the Scientific Evaluation Committee / Scientific Committee
- 2011 – 2017 Marco Ferretti
- 2017 – 2018 Karin Hansen, Lars Vesterdal
- 2018 – 2023 Marcus Schaub, Lars Vesterdal
- 2023 – Lars Vesterdal, Marcus Schaub, Vít Šrámek
Since then, the Scientific Evaluation Committee/ Scientific Committee has organized 10 Scientific Conferences, initiated a range of integrated evaluations, and promoted successfully ICP Forests and its activities.
While ICP Forests data were already used by others for top papers (e.g. Hanewinkel et al., 2012), in 2018 the ICP Forests community was successful in having a paper out in Nature (Van der Linde et al., 2018). Every year up to 90 peer-reviewed publications are based on data from the ICP Forests database and/or ICP Forests plots.
