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Litterfall is a major, yet poorly studied, process within forest ecosystems globally. It is important for carbon dynamics, edaphic communities, and maintaining site fertility. Reliable information on the carbon and nutrient input from litterfall, provided by litter traps, is relevant to a wide audience including policy makers and soil scientists. We used litterfall observations of 320 plots from the pan‐European forest monitoring network of the “International Co‐operative Programme on Assessment and Monitoring of Air Pollution Effects on Forests” to quantify litterfall fluxes. Eight litterfall models were evaluated (four using climate information and four using biomass abundance). We scaled up our results to the total European forest area and quantified the contribution of litterfall to the forest carbon cycle using net primary production aggregated by bioregions (north, central, and south) and by forest types (conifers and broadleaves …