We provided long-term stand and canopy structural data from permanent monitoring plots representative of three most diffuse temperate and Mediterranean forests, under different coppice management regimes. Periodic inventories were performed in the surveyed plots since the 70s. Annual litterfall production and its partitioning (leaf, woody, reproductive parts) and optical canopy measurements using the LAI-2000 Plant Canopy Anayzer were performed every year in these plots since the 90s. These data can be used for evaluating the influence of coppice management in the stand and canopy structure, the parametrization of radiative transfer models that require accurate ground truth data, as well as the calibration of high to medium resolution remotely-sensed data.

The module climate regionalization of the project “Forest productivity, carbon sequestration, climate change” contributes temporal and spatial high-resolution climate data from 1961 - 2100 for 26.450 points of the German National Forest Inventory. For the retrospective computation of the period 1961 - 2013 the historical daily observation data of climate and precipitation stations of the Deutscher Wetterdienst are regionalized with Geographically Weighted Regression. Future climate change scenarios are simulated with the STARS (2011 – 2050) and REMO (2011 – 2100) based on the MPI ESM ECHAM6 RCP scenarios (2.6, 4.5, 8.5). The NFI 2012 environmental data base climate contains timely aggregated climate information (monthly, seasonal, yearly, multiyearly) and provides the climatic input variables for the forest site water budget modelling and for the forest growth modelling.

A spatial explicit approach coping with potential modifications in ecological structures and functions of forests due to climate change and atmospheric deposition was developed for Germany (Jenssen et al. 2013; Schröder et al. 2015). As a result, two maps of current semi-natural forest ecosystem types of Germany (1991-2010) and the Kellerwald National Park (2001-2010) are presented. The data provided (Nickel et al. 2018) comprise 120 ecosystem types (89 near-natural ecosystems, 31 cultivated ecosystems) covering 27 % of Germany's territory and, respectively, 17 forest types (12 near-natural, 5 cultivated) covering 86 % of the National Parks area. The data are in particular of relevance for spatial ecology and conservation purposes.