Assessment of Trees Outside Forests (TOF) Using Remote Sensing

Dear Colleagues,

Why are we opening a Special Issue of Remote Sensing on the assessment of Trees Outside Forests (TOF)?

The answer is simple: it is generally acknowledged that trees have important economic and ecological functions—and we find trees not only in but also outside forests, both on natural and managed lands. The interest in TOF has actually been increasing constantly over the past decades both from a resource point of view and from an ecological perspective.

However, while there are many global and large area studies on forest cover, there does not appear to be many such studies on TOF. For example, Zomer et al. (2016) provided a global estimate for one type of TOF, agroforestry systems, and Schnell et al. (2015a) compared estimated national level forest and non-forest tree biomasses from FAO-assisted national forest inventories in 11 countries, where trees were both recorded on forest and non-forest lands. From these studies, the overall relevance of TOF became very obvious, although regionally considerably different. Publications on approaches that deal with the specific characteristics of the scattered, sometimes scarce resource TOF, are not abundant (e.g., Kleinn 2000, Schnell et al. 2015b) and do not focus on the potential of recent developments in remote sensing.

The planned Special Issue of Remote Sensing focusses on remote sensing to support the assessment of TOF. Contributions on any challenge in that context are welcome: purely technical remote sensing issues, issues of field sampling, modelling, harmonizing definitions, defining specific objectives, combination with other forest or landscape inventories, etc.

Interested authors are encouraged to submit their original manuscripts in the context of the assessment of TOF. We kindly ask the authors to carefully and explicitly explain in their manuscripts the definition of “forest“ that they apply – from which the definition of “TOF“ automatically derives. It is certainly helpful to illustrate with examples the “class of TOF“ considered for the assessment.

Please take into account that we are exclusively dealing here with biophysical definitions of “forest” (please refer, for example, to the definitions in the FAO forest classification, which base essentially on the criteria “minimum crown cover”, “minimum area”, “minimum height at maturity in situ” and “absence of other land uses than forest”), and explicitly not with legal definitions or general geographical definitions of land use classes.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Reference

1. Kleinn, C. On large area inventory and assessment of trees outside forests. Unasylva 2000, 51, 3–10.
2. Schnell, S; Altrell, D; G Ståhl and Kleinn, C. The contribution of trees outside forests to national tree biomass and carbon stocks-a comparative study across three continents. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 2015, 187, 4197.
3. Schnell S, C Kleinn and G Ståhl . Monitoring trees outside forests: a review. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 2015, 187, 600.
4. Zomer, R; Neufeldt, H; Jianchu, X; Ahrends, A; Bossio, D; Trabucco, A; van Nordwijk, M; Wang, M. Global tree cover and biomass carbon on agricultural land: the contribution of agroforestry to global and national carbon budgets. Nature 2016, doi:10.1038/srep29987

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• Trees outside forests
• Remote sensing
• Tree inventories
• Climate convention
• Biodiversity convention
• Landscape assessment
• Forest landscape restoration
• Tree cover in urban and rural landscapes