Assessment of the Health Status and Degradation Process of Forest Ecosystems

In recent years, adverse phenomena of climate change such as prolonged droughts, floods, storms, etc., have occurred. Under such circumstances, forest stands are subject to more frequent and intense stresses and deterioration due to the combination of unfavourable climatic conditions and impact of harmful biotic factors, mostly insect pests and fungal pathogens. The monitoring of health status provides baseline data on the distribution, occurrence and harmfulness of biotic agents or abiotic factors. The assessment of harmful impact and spread of the most important insect pests and fungal pathogens is essential for making decisions about their control. It is necessary to take into account the severity of the infection and the prevalence of pests, as well as their specific impact on the affected forests. Among the abiotic factors responsible for the deterioration of forests, damage caused by wind, wet snow and ice have the most negative impact. Snow- and windthrow stem breakage often provokes bark beetle attacks. As a result, physiological weakening of trees observe and impact caused by invasive pests and pathogens can become devastating, covering vast areas of forests that pose a threat to economically important tree species. Remote sensing has great potential for vegetation mapping in complex landscapes due to the ultra-high-resolution imagery acquired. The new technology in combination with terrestrial survey techniques and methods have a huge research potential, especially in protected forest areas. They obtain information for the sizes of areas of deteriorated by biotic, abiotic and fire damages, health status of vegetation, observation the habitat in which pests and diseases are spreading out.

We encourage studies from all fields, including experimental studies and monitoring approaches to contribute to this Special Issue in order to promote knowledge and adaptation strategies for the assessment of health status and deterioration, preservation and management of forest ecosystems.

Prof. Dr. Margarita Georgieva
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-anonymized 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.