Forest Soils and Their Potential for Climate Change Mitigation: Pools, Functioning and Processes

Dear Colleagues,

Climate change effects are starting to directly and indirectly affect our lives. Forest ecosystems are a natural sink of atmospheric CO₂ and soils contain about two thirds of the stored carbon. The sink capacity of forest soils is, therefore, a big chance to mitigate climate change effects, but it depends on natural variability (latitudinal and altitudinal gradients, parent material), forest management and land use changes.

Moreover, organic matter transformations include several processes that are key for nutrients cycling and overall soil functioning. Soil carbon may be stored in pools having different residence time, due to intrinsic chemical characteristics, physical protection mechanisms and biochemical stability, thus affecting the potential for carbon sequestration in the long term.

On the other side, forest soils exchange CO₂ and other green-house gases (CH₄ and N₂O, which have a much higher warming potential) with the atmosphere through processes related to carbon and nitrogen cycling. Acquiring more information on these processes and resulted fluxes is essential in order to increase forest soils potential for climate change mitigation.  

We encourage studies from all fields, including experimental studies, monitoring approaches and theoretical models, to contribute to this Special Issue in order to promote knowledge and strategies on forest soils.

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.

• Carbon sequestration
• soil carbon pools
• soil CO₂ emissions
• CH₄ fluxes
• N₂O fluxes
• pedology
• land use
• forest management