The Value and Conservation of Primary Forest

Dear Colleagues,

Human impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems continue to expand and the amount of intact primary forest is in precipitous decline. Intact primary forest is natural forest that is free of significant anthropogenic degradation and declines in ecological function caused by such well-studied examples as fragmentation, industrial logging, over harvesting of particular species, roads and mining. Intact forest landscapes comprise perhaps only 20% of the world’s remaining forest cover. There is much evidence that the world’s remaining intact primary forest supports exceptional environmental and social values relative to degraded forests, including: High biodiversity, refugia for imperilled biodiversity, climate change mitigation and high carbon storage, high faunal complexity linked to carbon storage and major sequestration, regulation of local and regional weather and maintenance of hydrological services, pollination and seed dispersal services, preservation of ecological and evolutionary processes, reduced fire incidence in the temperate and boreal forest and almost no fire incidence in most tropical forest, and; maintenance of indigenous and local people’s cultures, livelihoods and health. Anthropogenic impacts, especially at industrial intensities and large spatial scales, have been shown to degrade forest physical structure, species composition, diversity, abundance and functional organization as well as provoking fire and pests that disturb forests beyond their capacity to regenerate.

Preserving the integrity of disappearing intact primary forests is an urgent priority for current global efforts to halt the ongoing biodiversity crisis, slow rapid climate change and achieve sustainability goals. We encourage studies from all fields, including experimental studies, monitoring approaches and models, to contribute to this Special Issue in order to promote knowledge and conservation strategy for the preservation and management of the world’s last tracts of intact primary forest ecosystems.

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 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. 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.

• intact primary forest
• forest conservation
• forest degradation
• biodiversity
• climate mitigation