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Forests strongly modify the accumulation, metamorphism and melting of snow in mid and high-latitude regions. Recently, snow routines in hydrological and land surface models have been improved to incorporate more accurate representations of forest snow processes, but model inter-comparison projects have identified deficiencies, partly due to incomplete knowledge of the processes controlling snow cover in forests. The Snow Under Forest (SnoUF) project was initiated to enhance knowledge of the complex interactions between snow and vegetation. Two field campaigns, during the winters 2016–17 and 2017–18, were conducted in a coniferous forest bordering the snow study at Col de Porte (1325 m a.s.l, French Alps) to document the snow accumulation and ablation processes. This paper presents the field site, instrumentation, and collection methods. The observations include distributed forest characteristics (tree inventory, LIDAR measurements of forest structure, sub-canopy hemispherical photographs), meteorology (automatic weather station and radiometers array), snow cover and depth (snow poles transect and laser scan), and snow interception by the canopy during precipitation events. The weather station installed under dense canopy during the first campaign has been maintained since then and provides continuous measurements throughout the year since 2018. Data are publicly available from the repository of the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG) data center at http://dx.doi.org/10.17178/SNOUF.2022 (Sicart et al., 2022).

The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha has been utilized as a model for biological studies since the 18th century. In the past few decades, there has been a Renaissance in its utilization in genomic and genetic approaches to investigating physiological, developmental, and evolutionary aspects of land plant biology. The reasons for its adoption are similar to those of other genetic models, e.g. simple cultivation, ready access via its worldwide distribution, ease of crossing, facile genetics, and more recently, efficient transformation, genome editing, and genomic resources. The haploid gametophyte dominant life cycle of M. polymorpha is conducive to forward genetic approaches. The lack of ancient whole-genome duplications within liverworts facilitates reverse genetic approaches, and possibly related to this genomic stability, liverworts possess sex chromosomes that evolved in the ancestral liverwort. As a representative of one of the three bryophyte lineages, its phylogenetic position allows comparative approaches to provide insights into ancestral land plants. Given the karyotype and genome stability within liverworts, the resources developed for M. polymorpha have facilitated the development of related species as models for biological processes lacking in M. polymorpha.

The objective of this study is to analyse the role of heating and cooling in the context of energy efficiency obligation schemes (EEOS). The energy efficiency obligation schemes (EEOS) are market-based instruments and should be applied to generate the final energy savings as recommended and mandated in Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED). The EEOS are applied in the majority of EU Member States, either as sole policy measure or accompanied by alternative measures.

The EU Commission’s Fit for 55 package has outlined the need for increased emission reductions to comply with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C target. Incentivising more ambitious action, the multiple impacts approach emphasises co-benefits of energy efficiency, essentially increasing the cost effectiveness of related measures from a holistic perspective. Major EU projects such as ODYSSEEMURE and COMBI have expedited the knowledge base and methodology. However, in spite of significant benefits discovered and various tools created throughout these projects, the approach is hardly applied in policy-making, complexity and a limited applicability to new contexts being central inhibitions. Therefore, central tenets of the Multiple Impacts Assessment Tool (MICAT) project are the consideration of European, national, and local levels and the involvement of relative stakeholders and policy-makers in the whole development process of the resulting MICATool, in order to better tailor it to their wishes and needs. The involvement will start right from the conception and design phase: in the course of three national and one EU workshops, as well as in an ongoing exchange with three pilot cities, the demands and requirements regarding the design of the tool, the inputs, and the form of the results are discussed with stakeholders and policy-makers - ranging from European Commission (EC) officials and experts working on climate and energy at EU level, to national officials working in Ministries and other relevant bodies, to local administrators. This will allow the project team to shape and tailor the tool to fit the policy-making process as seamlessly as possible, envisaging the objective to render the multiple impacts approach a paramount aspect of cost-benefit analyses, enabling more ambitious policies to comply with the omnipresent cost effectiveness criterion in EU legislation. This paper examines how the multiple benefits approach and the MICATool need to be shaped in order to be highly policy-relevant and enable a seamless, ubiquitous, and impactful use in policy-making.