Norway – Environmental monitoring other than for construction – Monitoring of lime forest fungus in the period 2026 - 2028.

The Norwegian Environment Agency would like to continue monitoring lime forest fungus and carry out the third course of monitoring in the period 2026-2028, with the final report in 2029. The above objective of the programme is to monitor red-listed/endangered fungal species that have all or large parts (> 50%) of their habitat within lime-finde forests (lime-finde forest fungus). It is also desirable that other lime forest fungus and other red-listed, earth-living fungus species that can occur in lime-linde forests are included. Furthermore, monitoring shall register short-term and long-term changes in the populations of fungal species. In addition the programme shall register influence factors and environment variables that are of importance for the management of lime forest. The monitoring is based on previous monitoring of lime-finde forests and lime-finde forest fungus, which were initiated as part of the ARKO project (Areas for Red List Species – Mapping and monitoring). The first course of the monitoring was carried out in the period 2013-2015 (Brandrud et al., 2016) and other circulations in the period 2019-2021 (Brandrud et al., 2022). In other circulations, two pilot studies were also carried out, in 2019 and 2021, with the use of environmental DNA from soil samples. The procurement has a total cost limit of up to NOK 4,500,000 (excluding VAT) including options.