Forest Soil Monitoring

Dear colleagues,

Forest Soil Monitoring has never been as important as in our time, where severe disturbances due to climate change and air pollution are altering the preconditions for forest growth and wood production, nutrient recycling, carbon storage, water regulation, forest biodiversity, and many other ecosystem services. Forest soils provide the basis for these ecosystem services and are at the same time a long-term archive for the effects of forest ecosystem turnover processes. The state of forest soils is therefore affected by changing abiotic and biotic conditions. We need to know to what extent they will continue their support for ecosystem services in a changing world, what their current state is, and what kind of changes we may have to expect in forest ecosystems. The answer to such questions needs to make use of proper techniques to exploit the wealth of information gathered in the long-term data series of forest soil and ecosystem monitoring projects, since observations of forest development in the past are the key to understand their present and future.

The Special Issue on “Forest Soil Monitoring” of the journal Applied Sciences aims to attract a wide range of novel contributions from forest soil and ecosystem monitoring, including topics like:

• Observed and modeled dynamics in forest soils;
• Forest water relations;
• Carbon storage in forest ecosystems;
• Forests and the nitrogen cycle;
• Heavy metals in forests;
• Stability of forest soil properties;
• Forest stability and resilience;
• Forest growth under changing conditions;
• Forest biodiversity;
• Forest ecosystem functioning;
• Methodological aspects of forest monitoring.

Contributions in these fields and adjacent topics are very welcome.

Dr. Stefan Fleck
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.