Alexa Michel from PCC and co-authors were awarded the Thünen Research Prize for Excellence in Target Group-Oriented Work by the Society of the Friends of the Thünen Institute for their concept and realisation of the ICP Forests Brief.

On Monday, 9^th Dec 2019, the winners of the Thünen Research Awards 2019 were awarded as part of the first "Thünen Day". One out of five prizes was given to Alexa Michel, Inken Krüger, Anne-Katrin Prescher, Tanja Sanders, Andreas Schmitz and Walter Seidling for ICP Forests Brief: Publishing a new international publication series on European forest monitoring for better communication between science, politics and society. In representation…

On 21st November and 22nd November 2019, ICP Forests colleagues met delegates from the Acid Deposition Monitoring Network in East Asia (EANET) in a joint "Workshop on regional impact assessment of atmospheric deposition and air pollution on forest ecosystems" in Niigata, Japan. The workshop was initiated by Hiroyuki Sase in cooperation with ICP Forests chair Marco Ferretti to share and compare the European knowledge and experience with colleagues from EANET, and to promote further co-operation in the future. From the ICP Forests community, chair Marco Ferretti, head of…

Last week, the XXV IUFRO World Congress took place in Curitiba, Brazil.

One highlight was the very successful session on “Long-Term Forest Monitoring Networks for Evaluating Responses to Environmental Change” organised and chaired by the ICP Forests Scientific Committee chair Marcus Schaub, co-chair Lars Vesterdal, EANET partner Hiroyuki Sase and ICP Forests chair Marco Ferretti. In addition, several oral and poster presentations were presented by members of the ICP Forests community representing the broad range of research activities in the programm.

Thank you to all presenters, organisers and authors!

Together with 30 participants from 16 countries we had a successful meeting of the heads of the labs in Brasov/Romania from 5^th till 6^th of September 2019! The meeting was very well organized by Dora Lucaci and her team. We discussed the results of the last ring tests (water, foliage and soil). Limits for heavy metals (Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn) in water samples were fixed and water ringtest will be performed annually. The future of aqua regia digestion from soil samples with microwave, mercury deposition samplers and determination of mercury in these samples were presented and discussed. Three presentations about phosphorous and phosphorous fractions in soil were given. The final version of the ICP-Forests Manual update was presented and the verification of the submitted data from the LQA file was started. The next meeting will take place in Birmensdorf/Switzerland in September 2021.…