**Preface to "Technologies, Applications and Assessments for Proper Sustainable Forest Operations (SFO)"**

This Special Issue focused on the "Technologies, Applications, and Assessments for Proper Sustainable Forest Operations (SFOs)". One of the main topics was to promote knowledge for future relations between forest logging, environmental protection, and management of forests in order to provide timber at reasonable costs and other ecosystem services, such as recreation, conservation, and biodiversity. Only efficient planning and management of forest operations and the implementation of sustainable supply chains will offer high social and environmental benefits and provide various ecosystem services in the long term. These aspects can be guaranteed only through sustainable forest management in synergy with SFO, tools essential for proper environmental protection, and they are mandatory in order to maintain forests and their multiple functions. In particular, forest operations are interesting but delicate issues to be analyzed and evaluated in order to achieve real sustainability.

Authors were invited to contribute to this Special Issue with original papers including experimental studies, monitoring approaches, and models on silviculture, logging activities, and forest operations engineering, in order to promote knowledge and future strategies for effective and efficient SFOs.

This Special Issue contains 12 original papers, some of them reporting the outcomes of long-time experiences, reviewed by international experts in forestry and forest operations engineering fields.

This Special Issue aims to increase the knowledge concerning the SFOs, with practical implications at scientific and technical levels.

We are pleased to share these works with the scientific community, forest engineers, private owners, and public managing authorities, in the hopes that this edition will provide a cognitive base to improve SFOs and reduce arguments between different interests and opinions.

As Guest Editors, we want to express our gratitude to MDPI, who agreed to publish this book; to the staff of *Sustainability* and MPDI, for their kindness and professional support; to the reviewers, for improving original texts and clearing little slips; and to the authors, for providing their papers with ethical and scientific rigor.

Guest Editor contributions: The three coeditors equally contributed to organizing the Special Issue, to the editorial work, and to writing this editorial.

Funding: No external funding was obtained for editing this Special Issue and for writing the preface. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

This book collects a representative sample of the most recent papers on the subject, which come from many different countries and cover a variety of subjects, confirming the wide scope covered by the Sustainable Forest Operations topic.

This work was supported by the Italian Ministry for education, University and Research (MIUR) for financial support (Law 232/2016, Italian University Departments of excellence 2023–2027) project "Digitali, Intelligenti, Verdi e Sostenibili (D.I.Ver.So)—UNITUS-DAFNE WP3 and the Agritech National Research Center receiving funding from the European Union Next-GenerationEU (PIANO NAZIONALE DI RIPRESA E RESILIENZA (PNRR)—MISSIONE 4 COMPONENTE 2, INVESTIMENTO 1.4—D.D. 1032 17/06/2022, CN00000022). These papers reflect only the authors' views and opinions, neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be considered responsible for them.

## **Rachele Venanzi, Janine Schweier, and Rodolfo Picchio** *Editors*

## *Article*
