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

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

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 971

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Research Triangle Park, Durham, NC 27709, USA
Interests: forest health; biodiversity conservation; invasive species; landscape ecology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA
Interests: forest health; risk mapping; drought

Special Issue Information

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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Keywords

  • forest health monitoring
  • indicators
  • status and trends
  • invasive species
  • climate change
  • insects and diseases
  • regeneration trends
  • drought
  • wildfire
  • fragmentation

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

10 pages, 1732 KiB  
Article
Generalist Pests Cause High Tree Infestation, but Specialist Pests Cause High Mortality
by Qinfeng Guo and Kevin M. Potter
Forests 2025, 16(1), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/f16010127 - 11 Jan 2025
Viewed by 730
Abstract
Whether specialist pests can cause more damage to their host plants than generalist pests is a critical issue in both basic biology and nonnative species management. To date, there is no consensus on how we define “specialist vs. generalist” pests and how we [...] Read more.
Whether specialist pests can cause more damage to their host plants than generalist pests is a critical issue in both basic biology and nonnative species management. To date, there is no consensus on how we define “specialist vs. generalist” pests and how we should assess forest damage or impacts (volume loss vs. mortality). Here, we comparatively investigate whether nonnative generalist pests may cause more damage to US forests than nonnative specialist pests using two frameworks: (1) the “binary or dichotomous approach” through a largely arbitrary classification of specialist and generalist pests, and (2) the “specialist-generalist continuum”. We measure damage or impact in two ways, one by the total host volume infested and the other by total host mortality. In the binary comparison, generalists infested more host tree volume per pest species than specialists, but the latter (mostly pathogens) caused higher mortality of host trees. The “specialist-generalist continuum” concept could reveal a different pattern regarding pest invasions and impacts when there is no clear separation between generalists and specialists in a community or region. Therefore, we suggest using the “continuum” approach to address related questions in future studies, thus offering new insights into pest invasions that have deeper implications for forest pest monitoring and management. Full article
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