IN-SYLVA-FRANCE/ In-Sylva INRAE

In-Sylva France is a national distributed research infrastructure dedicated to forest adaptation to global changes and silvicultural innovation. Listed on the national infrastructure roadmap since 2018, it is coordinated by INRAE in partnership with seven research, teaching, and forest management organizations (CIRAD, CNPF, FCBA, OFB, ONF, and the University of Rouen Normandy).

In-Sylva France develops an integrated vision of forest management, with the goal of adapting forests to climate change, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring the sustainable production of ecosystem services, while considering the diversity of forest ecosystems and local contexts (biology, environment, management, value chains, local governance). In-Sylva promotes research projects on sustainable forest management by developing an access portal to services and, through a charter, to distributed resources. It also promotes academic and continuous training for sustainable forest management.

Its originality lies in coupling silvicultural, biogeochemical, genetic, and economic levers.

In-Sylva France provides services for forest observation and experimentation, thanks to in situ experimental networks with a dense territorial grid (>5000 sites, 4000 ha), In-Lab platforms (analytical platforms in functional ecology, biogeochemistry, xylosciences, and genetics, dedicated to high-throughput measurements of samples), and In-Silico technologies (databases and software for data analysis).

In-Sylva INRAE is supported by five Collective Scientific Infrastructures (ISC):

• 3 Experimental Units: GBFOR, UEFM, and UEFP for network experimentation;
• 2 Analytical platforms: Phénobois (linked to UMR Biofora, Biogeco, and PIAF) and SilvaTech (linked to UMR Silva) for analytical aspects.

To enhance its efficiency, In-Sylva France has implemented several tools useful to the forestry scientific community, education, and development:

• A "project hotel" to request the use of services. Requests are processed by In-Sylva France managers, who direct the applicant to the most appropriate service heads;
• A dataverse, a secure data repository providing access to the data and software codes and information systems from the infrastructure’s services for reuse;
• A HAL collection containing publications related to In-Sylva France (DOI datasets, scientific papers, reports, and presentations) to meet Open Access criteria for scientific information. These productions are also listed on the website's "Communication page."

In-Sylva INRAE aims to increase the use of these various services and foster their interactions and complementarities within research, development, or training projects, while facilitating access to specific funding to improve and strengthen this integrated offer.

Its activities lead to interactions with other research infrastructures such as ICOS, AnaEE, Phenome-Emphasis, and Rare.