MADERA PLUS CALIDAD FORESTAL SL

Their core work

Madera Plus Calidad Forestal is a Galician forestry SME specializing in wood quality assessment and sustainable forest management — the company name itself translates to "Wood Plus Forest Quality," reflecting their core business. Based in San Cibrao das Viñas in one of Spain's most commercially active forestry regions, they work at the intersection of forest operations and quality measurement, helping forest owners and the timber industry understand and certify the properties of standing and harvested wood. In their EU project work, they have contributed practical industry knowledge to research consortia developing wood phenotyping tools and satellite-based forest monitoring systems. Their value to a consortium is the operational forestry perspective of a practitioner who works daily with real forests and timber supply chains, not a laboratory researcher.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their H2020 participation spans just five years (2015–2020) and two projects, so the evolution is modest but readable. They entered EU research through TOPWOOD, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie staff exchange focused on the micro-scale: measuring and understanding the intrinsic properties of wood itself. Within two years they added MySustainableForest, shifting the scale outward to whole-forest landscape management using satellite imagery. The trajectory suggests a deliberate move from wood-level quality measurement toward forest-level digital monitoring — from bench to sky, so to speak. Whether this reflects growing company ambitions in precision forestry or simply opportunistic project participation is unclear from the available data alone.

They appear to be moving toward digital and space-enabled forestry tools, suggesting they would be a credible partner in future projects combining forest operations with remote sensing, precision forestry, or carbon stock monitoring.

How they like to work

Madera Plus has participated exclusively as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — across both projects, which is consistent with an industry SME bringing domain knowledge and field access rather than project management capacity. Their two projects involved 13 unique partners across 10 countries, a broad network for such a small company, indicating they were placed in well-connected international consortia. The combination of an MSCA-RISE (researcher mobility scheme) and an Innovation Action suggests they are comfortable playing different roles: providing staff exchanges in one project and contributing to operational prototyping in another.

Despite only two projects, Madera Plus has built connections with 13 distinct consortium partners spanning 10 countries — an unusually wide reach for an SME of this size and activity level. This suggests their projects were large, multi-partner consortia where their forestry operations expertise gave them a seat at an otherwise research-heavy table.

What sets them apart

What sets Madera Plus apart is the rare combination of being an operational forestry company — not a research institute — with direct experience in two quite different EU research frameworks: researcher mobility (MSCA-RISE) and operational innovation (IA). For a consortium building around real-world forest management, they bring something research partners cannot: access to actual forest operations, timber supply chains, and the commercial quality standards of the Galician wood industry. Their location in Galicia is also strategically relevant, as the region hosts some of the most intensively managed commercial forests in southern Europe, including large Eucalyptus and Pinus plantations — a testing ground that pure research labs cannot replicate.

Highlights from their portfolio

• MySustainableForest
  An Innovation Action — meaning it aimed at real operational deployment, not just research — this project applied satellite remote sensing directly to forest management, making it the most practically ambitious of the two.
• TOPWOOD
  Funded under MSCA-RISE (researcher staff exchanges), this project is unusual for an industry SME — it indicates the company hosted or sent researchers, signaling genuine R&D capacity beyond simple project participation.