Announcements

It is with immense pleasure that we announce the 1st International Electronic Conference on Forests (IECF):

Forests for a Better Future: Sustainability, Innovation, Interdisciplinarity

Forests contribute to the improvement of some important development issues focused on sustainability and responsible forest management as a shared and essential factor to address global challenges and guarantee the conservation and enhancement of the global forest heritage as well as the socio-economic development of production, environmental, and socio-cultural chains.

The global pandemic has forced us to reduce travel and to reflect on our ability to leave scientific acquisitions as a legacy to future generations. This reduced mobility stimulates us to maintain connections with the scientific network using emerging technologies. This conference is an opportunity to communicate our shared passion for forests, forest products and services, and forest biodiversity.

The conference will discuss the state of the art of forestry operations, wood supply chains, and ecosystem services, and objectives for the future will be sought. Sharing and discussing the latest research findings with the global community of scientists in the field of forests is the central purpose of this virtual meeting.

Topics of the conference include:

• Forest Ecology, Management and Restoration
• Forest Genetics, Ecophysiology and Biology
• Forests and Urban Forest Sustainability
• Forest Inventory, Quantitative Methods and Remote Sensing
• Wood Science, Production Chains and Fuelwood
• Forest Operations and Engineering
• Fire Risks and Other Natural Hazards

IECF is a virtual conference sponsored by Forests (ISSN 1999-4907; Impact Factor 2.116 (2018)). Participation is free of charge for authors and attendees. Accepted papers will be gathered in the proceedings of the conference. Selected extended versions of the papers will be published in a Forests conference Special Issue with a 20% discount applied to the article processing charge (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/Forests/special_issues/IECF2020).

IECF offers you the opportunity to participate in this international, scholarly conference without having the concern or expenditure of travel—all you need is your computer and access to the Internet. We would like to invite you to “attend” this conference by presenting your latest work.

For more information on IECF, please visit the conference website (https://iecf2020.sciforum.net/) or contact us by email (iecf2020@mdpi.com).

Since 1996, MDPI has been committed to supporting the research community by providing the latest research freely available and making relevant and useful research available as quickly as possible. The world is current experiencing a pandemic of COVID-19, and researchers are working extremely hard to understand it and find a cure.

The values MDPI holds strongly are particularly important at the moment, and we will continue to publish relevant, peer-reviewed research as quickly as possible in open access format. This means that it will immediately be available for researchers, health professionals, and the general public to read, distribute, and reuse. We believe that scientific advancements will be crucial to overcoming this pandemic, and will do everything we can to support researchers working looking for solutions.

COVID-19 Academic Resources Center contains a variety of information related to COVID-19 available from MDPI, including journal articles, special issues, and preprints, among others.

For more information, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/covid-19

As a leading Open Access publisher, MDPI is committed to fostering open scientific exchange in all forms across all disciplines. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, many researchers have to stay at home and many academic conferences have been cancelled or postponed. In light of these changes, MDPI has adopted numerous initiatives that may help accelerate scientific exchange and provide support to the academics during this period.

Scholarly Community—Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia is an online reference created and curated by active scholars. It aims to highlight the latest research results as well as providing benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics.

Comprehensive and Free Literature Database—Scilit

Scilit is a comprehensive, free database for scientists that uses a new method to collate data and index scientific material. Our crawlers extract the latest data from CrossRef and PubMed on a daily basis. This means that newly published articles are immediately added to Scilit.

Display Academic Achievements—SciProfiles

SciProfiles is an innovative social network for researchers and scholars that is developed by MDPI. In line with our broad mission, the purpose of SciProfiles is to accelerate discovery and innovation by facilitating immediate access to research results and providing opportunities for academic networking.

Organize and Participate in Conferences Online—Sciforum

Sciforum is an event planning platform that supports open science by offering the opportunity to host and participate in academic conferences. It provides an environment for scholarly exchange, discussion of topics of current interest, building of networks, and establishing collaborations.

Post Early Versions of Research Outputs—Preprints

Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. We post original research articles and comprehensive reviews, and papers can be updated by authors at any time. Content on Preprints is not peer-reviewed, and feedback can be received from readers.

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MDPI remains committed to open science and open data and has signed a statement, along with more than thirty scholarly publishers, showing our intention to facilitate sharing of new research findings as early on as possible. The initiative sees publishers collectively removing barriers to new research, in the face of a global healthcare crisis.

The world is currently suffering from a global pandemic of the corona virus COVID-19. MDPI expresses its sympathies for all of those affected by the virus and stands in solidarity with medical staff and researchers treating patients and searching for scientific solutions.

MDPI has previously published papers covering corona viruses in addition to new papers on the current outbreak, see all papers here. In particular, Viruses has published a number of Special Issues and papers on the topic (see here, here, and here) as well as a forthcoming Special Issue.

Alongside journal articles, MDPI has been a strong supporter of preprints, which are increasingly being used to rapidly disseminate the latest research, and we run the preprint server Preprints.org. Our database of research articles, Scilit, is free to use and covers all publishers including preprint servers. New papers are often in search results within hours of publication and users can set up alerts for new papers.

Our main priority during this period has been the health and safety of staff, and we continue to allow staff to work at home and closely monitor the situation in all locations in which we work. Despite the restrictions, we continue to provide a full publication service and, by close collaboration with our editorial boards and making use our in-house teams, ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in publishing vital research. Fast and open publication has always been at the core of MDPI values and is now more important than ever.

We hope that a solution to the current situation will emerge soon. In the meantime, we will do our best to continue communicating vital research in all fields.

The advantages of the open access model of scientific publishing are being increasingly recognized in the scientific community. It allows new scientific evidence to be accessed from the moment of publication for free by anyone around the globe, boosting the impact of new research. In response, many funders, libraries and universities have been adopting new principles to accelerate the transition to open access.

Recently, “transformative agreements” have been negotiated between traditional publishers and various institutions. While increasing the number of open access papers, these agreements lack binding commitments to a full transition to open access, their conditions vary across different regions, and access is still limited for many users.

MDPI is a co-signatory of the recent position statement raising concerns about potential downsides of transformative agreements and how they may delay a full transition to open access. The statement highlights that these models “risk perpetuating current limitations on access, transparency and market competitiveness, while simultaneously facilitating excessive charges on the public purse”.

As a pioneering open access journal publisher, MDPI is the first to promote the importance of science being made available to everyone. Our peer-reviewed journals, covering diverse academic disciplines, are fully accessible to the public free of charge under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). This is why, along with other open access publishers, MDPI is a proud signatory of the position paper and is committed to contributing to the replacement of weak transitional agreements with “agreements with publishers that are already fully committed to open science and who offer full, immediate and transparent Open Access”.

Read the position paper here

We are pleased to announce that Encyclopedia will be awarding five Outstanding Contributor Awards for researchers in 2020. The nominations and applications will be assessed by an Evaluation Committee consisting of senior scholars from the Encyclopedia Editorial Board.

Prize for Winners

1. An official certificate;
2. A cash award of 500 CHF or an MDPI discount voucher of 800 CHF.

Application Deadline

31 December, 2020 (Please send your application email with a list of all entries you contributed to our office before the deadline: office@encyclopedia.pub)

Candidate Requirements

1. Have a Ph.D. degree;
2. Have more than three qualified entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020.

Evaluation Standards

1. Number of entries published in Encyclopedia in 2020;
2. Quality of entries online (including length, figure quality, and novelty);
3. Impact of entries (including the number of likes, discussion contents, views, and downloads).

If you are a researcher and have not yet contribute entries to Encyclopedia, please do not miss this chance to highlight your research results.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Travel Awards, sponsored by MDPI and Forests. The awards were granted to two outstanding young researchers working in forests science areas:

Travel Award in Forests Graduate Student/Post-Doc 2020

Morgan Crowley is a PhD candidate at the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Québec, Canada. Her current research focuses on mapping and analyzing forest fires in Canada using satellite-based remote sensing and Google Earth Engine.
Ninni Saarinen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. Her current research focuses on characterizing and modeling of forest ecosystems at various scales—from the branches and stem of an individual tree to regional and national scale monitoring.

For more information about Forests awards, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/forests/awards.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Angela Lo Monaco was appointed Section Editor-in-Chief for the New Section “Wood Science”.

Prof. Dr. Angela Lo Monaco works at the University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy. The fields of her research activity particularly concern wood anatomy, dendrochronology, xylology, evaluation of wood quality, and the restoration of wood and wooden objects. Her research topics can be summarized as follows:

1. Wood anatomy, diagnosis, and characterization of lumber and of artefacts in cultural heritage;
2. Dendrochronological analysis;
3. Wood valorization;
4. Wood for energy
5. "Wood culture" diffusion.

We are confident that the strong academic background and connections of Prof. Dr. Lo Monaco will help to continue raising Forests' prestige and quality, while maintaining the efficiency of manuscript processing that Forests authors have come to expect.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Luis Diaz-Balteiro was appointed as the Section Editor-in-Chief for the Section 'Forest Economics and Human Dimensions' in the journal Forests.

Since 2012, Dr. Luis Diaz-Balteiro is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Environmental Engineering and Management (Technical University of Madrid). His research has focused on the design and implementation of diverse analytical tools for solving problems associated with economics and forest management issues.

We are confident that the strong academic backgrounds and connections of the Editor will help continue to raise the prestige and quality of Forests, while maintaining the efficiency of manuscript processing that Forests authors have come to expect.

For more information about Forests, please visit: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/forests

Editorial Board Members of Forests held a fruitful Editorial Board Meeting on 29 Sep–5 Oct 2019 in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, during the "XXV IUFRO World Congress".

The delegate of Forests Mr. Nathan. Li met editorial board members in VIP lounge room. The meeting was a great opportunity to exchange experiences and knowledge on journal growth and development, as well as to stay up to date on the latest research findings and trends for the future of forestry and forest research in all areas of the world.

On behalf of the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Timothy A. Martin, we would like to once again thank all the participants for their excellent suggestions for the strategy development plan. To get more of the latest journal news or published papers, please follow Forests website at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/forests.