Engaging Land Owners to Reduce Wildfire Risk at Landscape Level

Dear Colleagues,

Large wildfires often affect areas belonging to multiple landowners, private and public, non-industrial and industrial. This poses specific and complex problems for landscape management aimed at fire prevention and rehabilitation of burned areas, which has to reconcile diverse, potentially conflicting values and interests. This Special Issue is motivated by our recent experience with a 2017 wildfire in Central Portugal that burned 17,500 hectares, including 6000 hectares in Alvares, a densely forested parish with some 3000 private landowners. A small group of these landowners undertook the initiative of promoting collective action for forest management, whereby a large contiguous area with multiple landowners is meant to be subject to a single management plan, developed in collaboration with the University of Lisbon. The plan aims at rehabilitating the burned area with a landscape design to reduce its vulnerability to large wildfires. Key objectives are to protect local communities, while keeping plantation forestry as the main economic activity.

This Special Issue will include a series of papers describing various aspects of that collaboration. We welcome other researchers working in similar research projects to share their experiences by submitting contributions to this Special Issue of Forests.

Prof. Dr. José M.C. Pereira
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.