Climate Change and Stress Factors on Forest Vegetation: Regulation of Morphological, Physiological and Molecular Characteristics

Dear Colleagues, 

Forests comprise a vertical mosaic of trees, shrubs, lianas, herbs, bryophytes and epiphytes, whose survival now hinges on their capacity to regulate morphological, physiological and molecular networks under unprecedented climatic volatility—rising temperatures, hydrological extremes, elevated CO₂, nutrient deposition and novel pollutants.

This Special Issue, “Climate Change and Stress Factors on Forest Vegetation: Regulation of Morphological, Physiological and Molecular Characteristics,” seeks mechanistic studies that investigate how forest plants perceive and integrate these stressors to remodel their structural architecture, coordinate hydraulic and photosynthetic performance, and reprogram transcriptional, epigenetic, proteomic and metabolic pathways.

Submissions from forest ecophysiology, functional genomics, molecular ecology, systems biology, plant–microbe interaction research and vegetation–climate modelling are welcome, particularly those coupling field or controlled-environment experiments with high-resolution imaging, multi-omics, isotope tracing, genetics or network inference to reveal causal links between stress factors and trait regulation across organizational scales and to clarify how individual-level adjustments cascade to population fitness, community turnover, biogeochemical cycling and forest–atmosphere feedbacks.

By collating such integrative work, the Special Issue aims to delineate the regulatory blueprints that govern forests’ resilience or vulnerability, providing actionable insights for adaptive silviculture, conservation genetics and predictive Earth-system models in a rapidly changing world

Prof. Dr. Ahmed Abou El-Yazied
Dr. Yanqun Xu
Prof. Dr. Mohamed F.M Ibrahim
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 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-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.