Jean Pardé, a Lorraine researcher who marked the French Forest Research

Jean Pardé joined forest research in 1954 within National School Forestry, he was a major actor in the French Forest research. He contributed to the organization of forest research within INRA after 1964 and the connexion between French and German researchers. It took the initiative to renew exchanges by traveling to Freiburg in 1954, while the German forest research was just beginning to reorganize. His merits have been widely recognized in Germany; thus Jean Pardé was awarded Honorary Doctor of the Maximilian University of Munich. He was awarded by the forest faculty of the University of Freiburg and received the prize Wilhelm Leopold Pfeil. The Forestry Faculty of the Georg August University Göttingen awarded him, he received the Heinrich Christian Burcckhardt medal and the Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate land of forests awarded him the medal of Merit. His human qualities as much as its scientific values were unanimously recognized.

Specialist of dendrometry, Jean Pardé led the unit of forest and production research. He was director from 1964 to 1973 of the National Center for Forest Research (name at the time) in Nancy then Champenoux. He was very dedicated to the dissemination of research results to stackholders and assured a long time the role of editoring chief of the "Revue Forestière Française" and continued long of his retirement (1984). Even the day before his death in 2008, he was there to write articles.

The NFZ.forestnet network (Nancy, Freiburg and Zurich) was launched during to 2006. Long before that date, scientific exchanges between German researchers, French and Swiss existed. A 6 min long movie, available below, shows how these exchanges have developed after breakdown due to the Second World War. It amphisizes the implication of John Pardé in these exchanges.