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"Future Forests" advances to the next round
Two Clusters of Excellence initiatives at the University of Freiburg have advanced into the next round of the Excellence Strategy Competition: One of them is the cluster initiative "Future Forests – Adapting Complex Social-ecological Forest Systems to Global Change". It has been invited by the German Research Foundation to submit a full proposal by August 22, 2024. Next to several faculties of the University, the Forest Research Institute of Baden-Württemberg (FVA) is a partner in various research topics such as biodiversity, forest adaptation, water balance, and decision taking processes.
Background and further procedure
143 draft proposals were submitted by 59 universities in the second round of this initiative. Almost all draft proposals envisage the participation of a non-university partner. Most of the concepts were submitted by interdisciplinary consortia. 41 projects were selected to now compete further with 57 Clusters of Excellence that have been funded since 2019 and now want to submit follow-up applications.