Forest Dynamics under Climate and Land Use Change

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Ecology and Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2025 | Viewed by 1372

Special Issue Editors


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Department of Biology, University of Naples Federico II, 80126 Naples, Italy
Interests: soil biodiversity; microorganisms; decomposers; n cycles; microbiome
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the context of accelerating climate change and intensifying land use pressures, understanding forest dynamics has never been more critical. Climate change significantly influences forest health, altering growth rates, species distribution, and biodiversity and rising temperatures alter precipitation patterns, increasing the frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts while storms are pivotal climate-related factors affecting forest resilience and productivity. Concurrently, land use changes, including deforestation, urban expansion, and agricultural intensification, have led to habitat fragmentation and loss, further stressing forest ecosystems. These transformations not only reduce the carbon sequestration capacity of forests but also impair their ability to support biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services. The interactions between climate change and land use change create complex feedback loops, complicating forest management and conservation strategies. Adaptive management approaches that incorporate predictive modeling and real-time monitoring are essential for mitigating these adverse effects and enhancing the resilience of forest ecosystems. Hence, there is a need for integrated policies that address both climate and land use impacts to sustain and restore forest ecosystems in the face of environmental change.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • The impacts of climate and land use change on forest functioning;
  • The responses of vegetation, soil, and epigeal fauna;
  • The resistance and resilience of forest ecosystems to global changes;
  • The modeling of future scenarios of forest changes under different climate and land use transformations;
  • The restoration of forest ecosystems.

Dr. Lucia Santorufo
Dr. Giorgia Santini
Guest Editors

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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2600 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.

Keywords

  • vegetation dynamics
  • soil functioning
  • soil organisms
  • restoration
  • modeling

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

22 pages, 1798 KiB  
Review
Accounting for Land-Use Changes in Environmental Impact Assessments of Wood Products: A Review
by Charis Anaïs Kanellos, Miguel Riviere, Thierry Brunelle and David W. Shanafelt
Forests 2024, 15(12), 2242; https://doi.org/10.3390/f15122242 - 20 Dec 2024
Viewed by 916
Abstract
Environmental policy and the expansion of the bioeconomy sector has led to increased demand for wood and wood products, pressuring forests. In order to meet additional demand, foresters must either intensify forest management practices or alter forest area. One of the more observable [...] Read more.
Environmental policy and the expansion of the bioeconomy sector has led to increased demand for wood and wood products, pressuring forests. In order to meet additional demand, foresters must either intensify forest management practices or alter forest area. One of the more observable shifts in forest management comes in the form of changes in land use or land cover. Yet despite the many short- and long-term consequences of land-use change, the environmental impacts of it are less explored in forestry than in agriculture. In this paper, we conduct a literature review over the period between 1993 and 2022 to better understand how the notions of land-use and land-cover change are included in environmental impact assessments related to the production of wood and wood products. Specifically, we identified five categories of impacts studied and found a surprising dichotomy in terminology between land-use/land-cover change and changes in forest management practices. We present general trends in the methods and indicators used and discuss potential methodological and conceptual challenges inherent to this literature. Our results are particularly important in light of the growing popularity of land-use and land-cover data in research, as we highlight how they have been integrated into existing environmental impact assessment methods and how we can improve them going into the future. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forest Dynamics under Climate and Land Use Change)
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