Forest Management and Certification Systems

Dear Colleagues,

For the past three decades, sustainable forest management has become an integral part of regulatory as well as voluntary forest policy tools. Certification is a voluntary verification process that provides an independent third-party assessment of sustainable forestry practices and chain-of-custody tracking of certified wood products from forests to the end consumer. Apart from existing national and international certification standards, there are also regional and guidelines. Using a bottom–up approach, certification aims to support forest owners and managers, local communities, as well as policy makers to integrate sustainability requirements into their strategies and business practices. Certification is intended to support development of best practices in forest management. Most third-party certification programs and procedures allow for the participation and input from a broad range of stakeholders, thus ensuring that environmental, social, and economic aspects of forest management will be considered. Approximately 520 million ha of forests were certified globally by 2019 under one or both of the two major third-party programs: Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or the Program for Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC); 93 million ha were certified by both programs. This Special Issue welcomes studies that consider environmental, social, and economic aspects of forest certification and their influences on sustainable forest management. Articles will focus on research addressing the role forest certification plays in the enhancement of forest resources and their contribution to global carbon cycles, maintenance of forest health and vitality, encouragement of productive and protective functions of forests, conservation of biodiversity, socio-economic influences and forest health, and certification perspectives of stakeholder sectors.

Dr. Hubert Paluš
Prof. Dr. Richard P. Vlosky
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.