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The report benefited from the helpful comments from three external reviewers, Fernando Valladares from the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), Janez Potočnik, ThinkForest President and co-chair of the International Resource Panel, and an anonymous reviewer. We wish to express our thanks for their insights and comments that helped to improve the report, and acknowledge that they are in no way responsible for any remaining errors.Closer-to-Nature Forest Management 3. Use adaptive management as a way to tackle uncertainties: We need to regularly monitor forest responses to management interventions, evaluate these responses and adjust management strategies accordingly.A similar adaptive approach is urgently required to evaluate the impact of policy measures and support mechanisms proposed to encourage adoption of Closer-to-Nature Forest Management. Not a quick-fix, long-term measures are needed:The introduction of Closer-to-Nature Forest Management is not a 'quick-fix' and policy makers must provide long-term and consistent support measures to encourage forest managers and other stakeholders to adopt this strategy. Support for forest owners for training and application of the strategy is key. Review existing subsidy and taxation regimes for private owners:Convincing private owners to follow this approach will require the creation of schemes that reward them for providing ecosystem services. Closer-to-Nature Forest Management has the potential to support biodiversity, adapt forests to climate change and provide ecosystem services to a higher level than conventional forest management. There is an urgent need to review existing subsidy and taxation regimes affecting private forestry, and to consider how these might be changed to further the uptake of Closer-to-Nature Forest Management. Develop and use new technologies and tools:There is a need to harmonize monitoring systems and to develop and use new technologies and tools (GIS, GPS and remote sensing) to ease management of these more diverse and structure-rich forests.Finally, there are still some uncertainties about the effect of certain elements of Closer-to-Nature Forest Management on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem health, and how they will affect other ecosystem services including wood production under different management conditions throughout Europe. This calls for more collective learning, experimentation and research.

The development of societies, including spiritual development, is closely connected to forests. The larger interrelations among changing societies, transforming forest landscapes, and evolving spiritual values related to forests have yet to be extensively considered. Addressing this research gap is important to avoid the neglect of spiritual values in forest policy and management. Our exploratory study investigates spiritual values of forests from European and Asian perspectives, assessing 13 countries. Based on expert knowledge from 18 interdisciplinary experts, we first define forest spiritual values (forest spirituality). We then elaborate on the idea that forest spirituality evolves as societies and landscapes change, and propose a transition hypothesis for forest spirituality. We identify indicators and drivers and portray four stages of such a transition using country-specific examples. We find that during a first stage ("nature is powerful"), forest spirituality is omnipresent through the abundance of sacred natural sites and practices of people who often directly depend on forests for their livelihoods. An alternative form of spirituality is observed in the second stage ("taming of nature"). Connected to increasing transformation of forest landscapes and intensifying land-use practices, "modern" religions guide human-nature interrelations. In a third stage ("rational management of nature"), forest spirituality is overshadowed by planned rational forest management transforming forests into commodities for the economy, often focusing on provisioning ecosystem services. During a fourth stage ("reconnecting with nature"), a revival of forest spirituality (re-spiritualization) can be observed due to factors such as urbanization and individualizing spirituality. Our core contribution is in showing the connections among changing forest perceptions, changing land-use governance and practices, and changing forest spirituality. Increasing the understanding of this relationship holds promise for supporting forest policy-making and management in addressing trade-offs between spiritual values and other aspects of forests.