The interactive viewer of the LIFE Haya – Hardwood For The Home Project is a cartographic tool designed to facilitate the consultation and analysis of the main forestry aspects related to the management and valorisation of beech forests in northern Spain.

Through this resource, managers, technicians, researchers and the general public are offered a comprehensive vision of the territory, aligned with the objectives of conservation, sustainable use and climate change mitigation promoted by the project.

The viewer allows exploration of a number of key thematic layers that provide ecological, production and certification context for beech forests, including:

• Location of the different demonstration stands of the project managed by Next to Nature Forestry.
• Distribution of beech forests in Spain: shows the area of presence of Fagus sylvatica in the area of action, which allows the spatial location of the ecosystems targeted by the project.
• Distribution of PEFC-certified beech forests: indicates beech forest stands with PEFC sustainable forest management certification.
• Estimated timber stocks in 1985 and in 2023: this allows a comparison of the evolution of the volume of timber accumulated in the forest over almost four decades, revealing trends in growth, biomass increase and carbon storage potential.
• Estimated net annual growth: provides an estimate of the increase in timber volume per unit area per year, useful for assessing productivity and planning sustainable uses.
• Year of last estimated disturbance: identifies possible historical events such as fire, logging or natural disturbances that have affected the forest, providing context for adaptive management and regeneration.

These timber stock and disturbance maps were extracted from the SAFoD (Spanish Atlas of Forests and Disturbances, https://fodim.uah.es/.), generated in the framework of the projects PID2020-114062RA-I00 and CNS2022-135251, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Information on the methodological framework is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.119432

This viewer is a strategic resource that supports informed and transparent decision-making, facilitating the planning of forestry actions close to nature, the monitoring of biodiversity and carbon indicators, and the integration of the ecological and productive values of the beech forest in the forest value chain. It also promotes the transfer of knowledge and the replicability of the model in other European regions with similar conditions.