Special Issue "Sustainable Forest Management and Environmental Hazards Prevention"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Hazards and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2022.

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Abolfazl Jaafari
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, Agricultural Research, Education, and Extension Organization (AREEO), Tehran 64414-356, Iran
Interests: forestry; forest engineering; data science; predictive modeling; vulnerability assessment
Dr. Davood Mafi-Gholami
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Forest Sciences, Faculty of Natural Resources and Earth Sciences, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord 8818634141, Iran
Interests: forestry; climate change; spatial modeling; vulnerability assessment

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The implementation and monitoring of sustainable forest management remains challenging in an era of increasing types and intensities of environmental hazards. While local and national governments might be able to address the anthropogenic threats that emerge locally, the threat of many natural hazards such as fires, storms, rainfall pattern changes and drought occurrence, insect pests, and extreme temperatures (heat wave, cold wave and extreme winter conditions), are existential and require a timely global response if forest resources are to be sustained. Sustainable forest management in combination with risk and vulnerability assessments facilitates decision making and the development of management strategies to mitigate the adverse effects of various stresses and protect ecosystems. This Special Issue welcomes studies that consider interdisciplinary perspectives of forest sustainability to address the management challenges posed by natural hazards. In particular, this Special Issue will include articles that examine one or more of the following general themes:

  • Innovative use of state-of-the-art strategies, technologies, and methods/models for sustainable forest management;
  • Innovative use of state-of-the-art strategies, technologies, and methods/models for environmental hazards prevention in forest ecosystems;
  • Developing new approaches to support risk and vulnerability assessment in forest ecosystems;
  • Adopting adaptation programs to enhance the resilience of forest ecosystems to environmental hazards;
  • Determining the level of forest ecosystems vulnerability to environmental hazards;
  • Determining the historical impact of environmental hazards on the sustainability of forest ecosystems;
  • Predicting the future vulnerability of forest ecosystems to different climate change scenarios;
  • Predicting the future species distributions in response to different climate change scenarios.

This Special Issue is also open to studies that model the probability of occurrence of any types of natural hazards (e.g., fire, wind, drought, deforestation, land degradation, landslide, flood, extreme temperature, earthquake, sea-level rise, or volcano) and man-made hazards (e.g., logging operations, road construction, oil spill, gas flare, or heavy metal contamination) at any spatial level (e.g., state/provincial, national, or international) and temporal scale (e.g., month, year, decade, or century).

Dr. Abolfazl Jaafari
Dr. Davood Mafi-Gholami
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 papers will be 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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 1900 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.

Keywords

  • forest ecosystems
  • natural hazards
  • man-made hazards
  • hazard assessment
  • risk assessment
  • vulnerability assessment
  • adaptation
  • modeling
  • prediction

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

Article
Forestry Research in the Middle East: A Bibliometric Analysis
Sustainability 2021, 13(15), 8261; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158261 - 23 Jul 2021
Viewed by 465
Abstract
Research trends in the field of forestry have experienced a significant evolution in recent years. However, there has been little use of bibliometric analyses to assess academic organizations and individual researchers in this field of science. This study investigates the progress of forestry [...] Read more.
Research trends in the field of forestry have experienced a significant evolution in recent years. However, there has been little use of bibliometric analyses to assess academic organizations and individual researchers in this field of science. This study investigates the progress of forestry research in Iran, Israel, and Turkey based on a bibliometric analysis of 2482 documents published between 2005 and 2019 and indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) scientific information platform. The countries were analyzed and compared in terms of the number of documents, the number of citations, the mean number of citations per document, the h-index, the share of funded articles, and several other metrics. A complete keyword network with graphical visualization and cluster analysis was also used for depicting the most frequent keywords used by the authors from these three countries. The results showed that the number of publications on forestry research grew steadily during the study period. Turkey, with 1529 documents, was the most active in publishing research in the field of forestry, followed by Iran (726 documents) and Israel (219 documents). Turkey’s publications received 11,220 citations with a cooperation coefficient (CC) of 0.587 that revealed a strong relationship between international collaboration with the USA, Germany, and Italy, and the number of citations, such that the articles with co-authors affiliated to foreign institutions were cited far more often than the articles with Turkish authorship. Although Iran (CC = 0.680) and Israel (CC = 0.706) recorded more activities in international collaboration than Turkey, their publications received much lower citations (Iran’s citations = 4433, Israel’s citations = 3939). Israel had 136 articles (62%) that received research funding, followed by Turkey and Iran with 604 (39%) and 284 (38%) articles. Nine out of the ten most popular journals among Israeli researchers were ranked as quartiles 1 and 2 in the forestry category, whereas Iranian and Turkish researchers mostly published in fewer journals ranked as quartiles 1 and 2. The most frequent keywords (i.e., topics) were species, condition, forest, and tree. Insights provided here can help balance research activities towards publishing more informed and effective scientific articles. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Forest Management and Environmental Hazards Prevention)
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