Abstract
<jats:p>Under climate change and shifting fire regimes, a wildfire can trigger forest responses ranging from full recovery to shifts toward non-forest states. Understanding the trajectories of forests after fire and the effectiveness of post-fire management and restoration strategies is essential for designing sustainable forest management. However, our capacity to learn from local field studies is limited as they lack the capacity to extrapolate results to broader scales, and scientific syntheses often suffer from non-standardised data generation. Such limitations can be tacked by conducting coordinated, distributed studies, in which many sampling sites are collaboratively implemented following a common protocol across large geographic regions. This approach allows responding research questions broadly as well as robustly assessing the drivers of heterogeneity.The FireTran project aims to establish an international distributed research network across Mediterranean countries to monitor post-fire forest trajectories and experimentally test the effect of small-scale restoration treatments in modulating these trajectories. The project aims to collaboratively monitor dozens of sites across the region –under small local effort– to quantify regeneration dynamics and assess the drivers of heterogeneity at plot, site, and regional scales. Additionally, voluntary experimental treatments (tree planting, seeding, soil transfer) can be implemented at a subset of participating sites. Remote sensing will help locate field plots and, through integration with field data, it will allow to assess large-scale drivers through spatial upscaling.The FireTran project will soon initiate a local pilot phase in Granada. The study protocol will build on the lessons learned therein and learn from consultation with scientists and stakeholders. It will be published to invite scientists from Mediterranean countries to participate in the distributed study by establishing local sites. The protocol will establish the scientific aims, network structure and governance, field methods, requirements for co-authorship, and the data management approach. The presentation will provide a general overview of the project, invite the audience to provide input for the protocol, and screen their prospective willingness to participate by establishing local field sites.</jats:p>