The SUDOE territory needs healthy and functional forests that guarantee goods and services for rural and urban society. COMFOR-SUDOE seeks to promote complex forests (mixed and irregular) and multi-species plantations as a resilient and adaptive alternative to threats such as global change and the decrease in biodiversity. These types of forests increase, and in many cases improve, the options for ecosystem services obtained from other more simplified forest systems. Research in the SUDOE space must contribute to inform policies and smart management measures that favor the diversification of forest structures, guaranteeing the transfer of knowledge and the balance of transnational R & D & I effort. The main products of COMFOR-SUDOE are methodological (characterization of complex forests, natural capital accounting, formation and social meaning of this type of forests), innovation (combined use of land and ground LiDAR technologies and multispectral images for forest monitoring complex), management (methods of transformation and diversification of structures and design of mixed plantations) and political (smart specialization strategy). To achieve the main objectives and products, COMFOR-SUDOE creates the Complex Forest Experimentation Network that brings together research in this type of forest systems in SUDOE, proposing pilot sites where to test transformation methods, mixed plantations and signaling classrooms. The Network for a smart specialization of SUDOE in complex forests (smartCOMPLEX) will be the forum where science, management and politics meet to develop the white paper for a Strategy of smart specialization in conservation and sustainable use of complex forests of SUDOE. The main beneficiaries of the project results will be rural and urban societies interested in maintaining the functionality and biodiversity of the SUDOE forests through management based on knowledge and innovation, articulated in an intelligent specialization of the SUDOE space.