Managing for Wood Quality: Analytics, Operational Tools and Applied Solutions

Dear Colleagues,

Global competition and societal change are eliciting incremental changes in forest management practices throughout temperate and boreal forest regions. Forest management objectives and associated silvicultural inputs are increasingly focused on enhancing end-product quality while providing a wider array of ecosystem services and maintaining or increasing volumetric fibre yields. Realizing this aspirational trivariate goal is partially dependent of the provision of enhanced in-forest operational intelligence and associated decision-making capacities in relation to the production and management of wood quality outcomes. Innovative research efforts continue to make consequential gains in addressing these issues via the development of wood quality and fibre attribute prediction models, in-forest non-destructive methods for estimating end-product potential, and crop planning decision-support systems and associated software analogues for use in operational forest management.

This Special Issue will attempt to benchmark the state-of-knowledge and highlight research efforts in these areas. For example, contributions that aim to (1) quantify or model conceptual or empirical linkages between external tree morphology (e.g., crown structure) or internal fibre attributes (e.g., wood density, microfibial angle or modulus of elasticity) and end-product potential, (2) advance in-forest non-destructive methodologies for use in estimating internal wood quality attributes (e.g., acoustics), or (3) develop and (or) demonstrate crop planning decision-support analogues for use in managing wood quality outcomes (e.g., density management models), would all be within the scope of this Special Issue. Furthermore, contributions that attempt to incorporate the consequences of climate change on wood quality determinates or management decision-making are also strongly encouraged.

Dr. Peter F. Newton
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-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.