Innovating Indicators: New Approaches for Tracking Forest Health Status and Trends in a Rapidly Changing World

Dear Colleagues,

Forests provide a broad range of goods and services for current and future generations, as well as safeguarding biological diversity and contributing to the resilience of ecosystems, societies, and economies. Many threats, including insect and disease infestations, fragmentation and conversion, catastrophic fires, invasive species, weather events, and climate change, threaten the ecological integrity of forests and their capacity to provide ecosystem and socioeconomic benefits. The systematic monitoring of forest health over time increases our understanding of how these disturbances are changing forest conditions and better informs land management and policy decisions. Advances in machine learning, remote sensing, analysis, and communication tools have the potential to enhance the  effectiveness of monitoring across a variety of scales, but challenges remain to harnessing these developments. This Special Issue will showcase innovative efforts to apply new tools that can quantify the status of, changes to, and trends in a wide variety of broadly defined indicators of forest health across a variety of scales, using both established and newer datasets.

Dr. Kevin M. Potter
Dr. Frank H. Koch
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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.

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