Relationship between Forest Landscape Structure and Animal Habitat

Dear Colleagues,

Most of the forest ecosystems of the world suffer from degradation due to their conversion into agricultural land or exotic tree plantations, to overexploitation, to fire, or to climate change. This leads to fragmented ecosystems, producing lower resources for animals and hindering genetic fluxes between animal populations. At the same time, technology is outstandingly developing, such as drones and their sensors, camera traps, sound recorders, and environmental DNA barcoding, all methodologies offering precision at reduced costs, which can be used to more easily characterize forests and conduct animal surveys at a larger scale and at more sites than ever. Additionally, digitalized maps of land use, productivity, or soil properties have become available at higher precision, and databases collect information for a still-growing number of organisms and traits. Thus, the conditions are favorable to the production of datasets with detailed forest structures and to the characterization of their biocoenoses, at a large scale. This Special Issue will welcome contributions exploring the relationships between forest properties, resource availability, and animal diversity in order to define conditions allowing the optimization of conservation actions, and to test more fundamental ecological questions.

Dr. Alain Hambuckers
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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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.

• landscape
• fragmentation
• connectivity
• diversity
• functional diversity
• resources