Fontainebleau, ancient forest and laboratory of the future: the FORÊT research project

A forest unlike any other

A former royal estate, the world’s first protected area for its cultural value, birthplace of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), biosphere reserve… The Forest of Fontainebleau occupies a unique place in French and international environmental history.

But like all ecosystems, it is also a territory affected by contemporary tensions: climate change, drought risks, pressure from recreational uses, the legacy of former hydraulic and industrial developments, and energy projects such as geothermal energy.

It is precisely this complexity that makes it an ideal study site for the FORET project, coordinated by Béatrice Cointe, research fellow at the Center for Sociology of Innovation (CSI – Mines Paris-PSL), and Samuel Abiven, director of CEREEP-Ecotron (Center for Research in Experimental and Predictive Ecology).

Understanding a socio-ecosystem in transition

The FORÊT project is based on the observation that a forest is not only a natural ecosystem, but also a socio-ecosystem, shaped by centuries of human use, including royal hunting, logging, water management, tourism, and heritage protection.

The objective is twofold:

• To better understand how this territory has evolved in the past
• To analyze how it could adapt to future global changes

Researchers are studying what they call the “critical zone”: the whole formed by the forest, the soil, the subsoil, the water, living beings… and the human societies that interact with them.

To do this, the project draws on a wide range of disciplines: sociology, geology, ecology, hydrogeology, paleoecology, architecture, history, biogeochemistry, and even photography.

Understanding a socio-ecosystem in transition

The FORÊT project is based on the observation that a forest is not only a natural ecosystem, but also a socio-ecosystem, shaped by centuries of human use, including royal hunting, logging, water management, tourism, and heritage protection.

The objective is twofold:

• To better understand how this territory has evolved in the past
• To analyze how it could adapt to future global changes

Researchers are studying what they call the “critical zone”: the whole formed by the forest, the soil, the subsoil, the water, living beings… and the human societies that interact with them.

To do this, the project draws on a wide range of disciplines: sociology, geology, ecology, hydrogeology, paleoecology, architecture, history, biogeochemistry, and even photography.

Reading the landscape as an archive

One of the unique features of the project is that it combines natural archives with human archives. Soils, for example, preserve chemical and biological traces of past fires or climatic variations. The landscapes themselves bear the imprint of past choices: forest roads, viewing points, underground canals, protected areas. This approach is also based on artistic and historical work. The Photographic Observatory of the Landscapes of the Fontainebleau Massif, led by the National Forestry Office with photographer Claire Tenu, allows iconic sites to be compared with pictorial references from the Barbizon school, an informal term referring both to the geographical and spiritual center of a succession of colonies of landscape painters established around Barbizon, and their desire to work “en plein air and from nature” in the forest of Fontainebleau. The work of landscape architect Frédérique Mocquet, devoted to the study of photographic landscape observatories, also provides a reference for understanding the scientific and sensory scope of these approaches. This observatory, independent of the FORET project, thus provides methodological and cultural support for documenting the evolution of the forest landscape. A sensitive and scientific way of documenting the evolution of the forest landscape.

A sandstone ridge called a “platière,” which is the alternation of long sandstone ridges, a few months (top) and then two years (bottom) after a fire. A dense stand of Pinus sylvestris is visible on the left. Claire Tenu, 2021, 2022. Plot 619 after the August 2020 fire, Fontainebleau Forest, winter 2021/summer 2022. Photographic observatory of the landscapes of the Fontainebleau Forest, viewpoint no. 42B. © Claire Tenu for the National Forestry Office.

Fire, a hidden memory in the soil

Among the research currently underway, the thesis of Thérèse Rabotin, a doctoral student jointly supervised by Mines Paris – PSL and CEREEP-Ecotron, explores a key question: how are forest fires recorded in the soil?

Entitled “Fire regimes in the Fontainebleau forest. How are fires archived?”, her thesis studies the traces left by past fires in the form of pyrogenic carbon. These residues, produced by the combustion of biomass, are genuine environmental markers.

By reconstructing the history of fires, scientists seek to understand how fire has helped shape the forest and how it could influence its future in the context of global warming.

A territory, researchers… and local stakeholders

The FORÊT project is not limited to laboratories. It relies on close collaboration with local stakeholders: the Office national des forêts (ONF), the Château de Fontainebleau, local authorities, heritage and scientific institutions.

Sophie Violette, from ENS – PSL, and Jean-Louis Grimaud, a lecturer and researcher at the Center for Geosciences, are working with these local stakeholders to create a network for measuring aquifer levels, which will be used to better understand the current dynamics of groundwater and anticipate its availability in the future in the context of climate change.

Interdisciplinary workshops are regularly organized in the field, bringing together researchers, architects, naturalists, geologists, and photographers. These meetings provide an opportunity to exchange views and jointly develop new ways of studying a changing environment.

Map of the Fontainebleau Forest in 1778 showing vast open areas (in light pink) in the central and southern parts of the forest, around the sandstone ridges. Guillaume-Nicolas Delahaye [author, illustrator], Sampierdarena [publisher/printer], 1778. New map of the Fontainebleau Forest based on the best plans. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Fontainebleau, a laboratory for the future

By studying Fontainebleau as a heritage, ecological, and scientific site, the FORÊT project poses a broader question: how can we think about the resilience of socio-ecosystems in the face of environmental crises?

The forest thus becomes a testing ground for understanding how the past, present, and future intertwine, and how our societies can draw inspiration from past trajectories to imagine more sustainable forms of management.

At a time when forests around the world are being weakened by climate change, Fontainebleau reminds us that landscapes are living archives and that their history can inform our future choices.

Fires shown in the QGIS-compatible layer of the Fontainebleau forest fire database (areas in red).

To go further:

• Chevalier, M., Abiven, S., Thauront, J. et al. An open-source database of historical wildfires in the Fontainebleau Forest. fire ecol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-025-00418-8