The EU Water Framework Directive aims to ensure restoration of Europe’s water bodies to “good ecological status” by 2027. Many Member States will struggle to meet this target, with around half of EU river catchments currently reporting below standard water quality. Diffuse pollution from agriculture represents a major pressure, affecting over 90% of river basins. Accumulating evidence shows that recent improvements to agricultural practices are benefiting water quality but in many cases will be insufficient to achieve WFD objectives. There is growing support for land use change to help bridge the gap, with a particular focus on targeted tree planting to intercept and reduce the delivery of diffuse pollutants to water. This form of integrated catchment management offers multiple benefits to society but a significant cost to landowners and managers. New economic instruments, in combination with spatial targeting, need to be developed to ensure cost effective solutions – including tree planting for water benefits - are realised. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are flexible, incentive-based mechanisms that could play an important role in promoting land use change to deliver water quality targets. The PESFOR-W COST Action will consolidate learning from existing woodlands for water PES schemes in Europe and help standardize approaches to evaluating the environmental effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of woodland measures. It will also create a European network through which PES schemes can be facilitated, extended and improved, for example by incorporating other ecosystem services linking with aims of the wider forests-carbon policy nexus.

Green spaces in cities are places where city dwellers can have contact with nature, which, according to the research to date, can have a very beneficial effect on their mental well-being. However, it is still not entirely clear which characteristics of green spaces are most beneficial in terms of their positive impact on people. In this study, we focus on identifying the restorative attributes of tree canopy sites (forests, street greenery) and open green spaces (water, meadows). Four psychometric tests were used to examine the subjects’ reactions before and after exposure to the analyzed environments (the control environment was the room in which the pre-test was conducted). The experiment was conducted with 55 young adult university students. It was shown that, compared to the post-housing (control) environment, all green spaces influenced the subjects’ well-being. The water environment had the most beneficial effect, followed by a meadow, a forest, and a housing estate with the presence of urban greenery. A short walk amid open urban green spaces, which provide more opportunities for observation, has a better impact on the well-being of the respondents compared to tree canopy sites such as forests or street greenery.

In the years 1998–2022, about eight thousand hydrotechnical facilities were built or planned for construction at the State Forests National Forest Holding in Poland, which could slow down the outflow of water from small forest catchments and store over 50 hm³ of water. Due to the innovative and unprecedented nature of investments retaining water resources on forest land, having a significant impact on the adaptation and mitigation of the negative effects of climate change, the literature on the subject lacks in studies describing their impact on the adjacent forest environment. The aim of the presented research is to determine the evolution of the tree-ring width of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) before and after the reconstruction of two water reservoirs and the construction of gates in drainage ditches as part of small retention projects in lowland areas. The research was carried out on the basis of core drillings collected in four forest districts and climate data provided by the Polish Institute of Meteorology and Water Management—National Research Institute. In the first stage of the work, no statistically significant influence of climatic conditions on the shaping of growths was demonstrated. In the next step, the variability of increments and their width in individual years before and after the investment was examined. Then, the distance of individual trees from reservoirs and drainage ditches was analyzed, as well as its importance in forming increments. The calculated statistical significance of differences in increments, average, minimum and maximum values, as well as standard deviation indicated the possible influence of retention reservoirs and valves on shaping the increments. The study did not confirm the importance of the distance of trees from the newly available water resources in the growth of the width of the increments.

Streszczenie. Praca przedstawia analizę przestrzennego zróżnicowania cech odnowienia naturalnego sosny zwyczajnej. Wszystkie powierzchnie odnowieniowe powstały w 2006 roku, gleba została przygotowana pługiem leśnym LPZ-75. Powierzchnie te znajdują się w granicach Nadleśnictwa Maskulińskie. Badania terenowe przeprowadzono w 2008 roku. Na dwuletnich samosiewach sosny zwyczajnej zmierzono wysokość od powierzchni gruntu do okółka i od okółka do wierzchołka, co stanowiło odpowiednio przyrost z pierwszego i drugiego roku wzrostu nalotu, określono także jego zagęszczenie w bruździe i na skibie. Dyskusja wyników zawiera opis czynników wewnętrznych i zewnętrznych mogących mieć wpływ na zagęszczenie, wzrost i przyrost wysokości podrostów sosnowych w poszczególnych wydzieleniach.