Forest Microbiome: Diversity, Complexity, and Dynamics

Dear Colleagues,

Forests are among the most biologically rich and functionally complex ecosystems on Earth. Beneath the canopy, diverse and dynamic microbial communities drive nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, plant health, and overall ecosystem resilience. This Special Issue, Forest Microbiome: Diversity, Complexity, and Dynamics, seeks to advance understanding of the composition, structure, and spatial–temporal variability of microbial communities in forest environments. Forest microbiomes regulate global biogeochemical cycles by mediating carbon turnover, nitrogen transformations, phosphorus mobilization, and trace gas fluxes, thereby influencing forest productivity and climate feedbacks. Mycorrhizal fungi enhance nutrient uptake and stress tolerance in trees, while endophytic and rhizosphere bacteria promote growth and strengthen plant defenses. In contrast, pathogenic microbes can disrupt these interactions, altering forest composition and succession.

Microbial diversity is shaped by host identity, soil characteristics, climate, disturbance, and landscape heterogeneity. Advances in multi-omics and high-throughput technologies have revealed vast microbial diversity, yet linking community composition to ecosystem function remains challenging. This Special Issue welcomes integrative, experimental, and modeling studies addressing microbial dynamics across scales, responses to environmental change, and applications in sustainable forest management, restoration, and climate mitigation. Contributions that connect fundamental microbial ecology with practical applications are especially welcome. We invite original research articles addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Patterns and drivers of forest soil and phyllosphere microbiome diversity;
• Mycorrhizal ecology and symbiotic networks;
• Microbial mediation of carbon and nutrient cycling;
• Microbiome responses to climate change and disturbance;
• Forest restoration, resilience, and microbiome engineering;
• Network analyses and system-level approaches;
• Emerging technologies in forest microbial ecology.

Dr. Lyudmyla Symochko
Prof. Dr. Maria Nazaré Coelho Marques Pinheiro
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-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.