Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
4.4
2.4
Journals
Forests
Special Issues
Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental...
share announcement

Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects—2nd Edition

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Inventory, Modeling and Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 December 2024 | Viewed by 2773

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Wei Shui

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Environment and Safety Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China
Interests: ecogeography; land use/cover change and ecological effects; remote sensing and geographic information technology applications; urban and rural planning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Junyu Qi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
CMNS—Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Interests: environmental impact assessment; hydrological modeling; watershed hydrology; water resources management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Forests are of interest for environmental construction banks, water conservation, climate regulation, biodiversity conservation and other benefits. Due to the warming climate and extensive human activities, forest ecosystems have suffered significant damage. The "Global Forest Cover Status and Change" report highlights that forest cover has decreased since the 21st century. The ecological benefits of forest cover for human health and sustainable social development are immense. Consequently, new theoretical perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches, and multi-source data are urgently required to explore the inherent issues, hypotheses, and themes in the field of forest cover and its ecological environmental effects.

The debate on the intrinsic link between forest cover changes and the environment continues. We invite you to share your innovative research in this field to this Special Issue of Forests entitled "Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects". The main objective of our Special Issue is to collect and disseminate the latest advances in forest cover change and its ecological and environmental effects. We encourage scholars from around the world to submit research papers investigating the relationship between forest cover and ecological environments using field surveys, experiments, remote sensing applications, GIS, geostatistical techniques, intelligent computing, forecasting, and simulations. We hope to highlight the latest advances in the field of conserving the environment and outline possible issues requiring further exploration to provide a more solid scientific basis and technological support for global and regional sustainable development.

Prof. Dr. Wei Shui
Dr. Junyu Qi
Guest Editors

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.

Keywords

  • forest land cover
  • environmental factors
  • ecological effects
  • environmental effects
  • biodiversity
  • ecological geography

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • e-Book format: Special Issues with more than 10 articles can be published as dedicated e-books, ensuring wide and rapid dissemination.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (3 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

22 pages, 5097 KiB  
Article
Disentangling the Response of Vegetation Dynamics to Natural and Anthropogenic Drivers over the Minjiang River Basin Using Dimensionality Reduction and a Structural Equation Model
by Yujie Kang, Ziqin Wang, Binni Xu, Wenjie Shen, Yu Chen, Xiaohui Zhou, Yanguo Liu, Tingbin Zhang, Guoyan Wang, Yuling Jia and Jingji Li
Forests 2024, 15(8), 1438; https://doi.org/10.3390/f15081438 - 15 Aug 2024
Viewed by 701
Abstract
Located at an average elevation of approximately 2000 m, the Minjiang River Basin (MJB), a key tributary of the Upper Yangtze River, straddles the Western Sichuan Plateau and the Sichuan Basin. Vegetation here is crucial for human life, providing oxygen and energy. However, [...] Read more.
Located at an average elevation of approximately 2000 m, the Minjiang River Basin (MJB), a key tributary of the Upper Yangtze River, straddles the Western Sichuan Plateau and the Sichuan Basin. Vegetation here is crucial for human life, providing oxygen and energy. However, the influence of climatic variables, human activities, and rugged terrain on vegetation vitality is still debated. This study mainly leverages data from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), meteorological stations data, and land use data. Analytical techniques include trend analysis, partial correlation coefficient analysis (PCC), principal component analysis (PCA), and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Results indicate a stable upward trend in vegetation growth with minimal fluctuations, with a growth rate of 0.95 × 10−3/a (p < 0.01). PCC analysis shows a positive correlation between NDVI and key climatic elements in over 60% of the area. The areas with significant vegetation growth had the highest average PCC. PCA and PLS-SEM identify temperature and precipitation as primary growth drivers, while elevation and land use intensity hinder growth. The MJB landscape reveals thresholds and tipping points, with specific temperature and precipitation benchmarks varying by elevation, delineating the boundary between flourishing vegetation and growth inhibition. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects—2nd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

15 pages, 3579 KiB  
Article
Woody Plant Structural Diversity Changes across an Inverse Elevation-Dependent Warming Gradient in a Subtropical Mountain Forest
by Yuqiao Su, Xianhua Gan, Weiqiang Zhang, Guozhang Wu and Fangfang Huang
Forests 2024, 15(6), 1051; https://doi.org/10.3390/f15061051 - 18 Jun 2024
Viewed by 660
Abstract
Examining the changes in woody plant structural diversity along an inverse elevation-dependent warming gradient will enhance our mechanistic understanding of how warming affects forest communities because such an inverse elevational gradient reflects a warming trend in a mountain landscape. Here, we investigated the [...] Read more.
Examining the changes in woody plant structural diversity along an inverse elevation-dependent warming gradient will enhance our mechanistic understanding of how warming affects forest communities because such an inverse elevational gradient reflects a warming trend in a mountain landscape. Here, we investigated the effects of warming on the patterns of species composition and structural diversity in a subtropical broadleaved forest. We calculated a warming index based on elevational difference and modeled the aspect-related potential incident radiation (PDIR) using nonparametric multiplicative regression. We tested the changes in structural diversity of three communities for significant differences along the warming gradient. We associated both the warming index and PDIR with the principal components and tested their relationships for significant differences. We found that trees of different sizes varied in their response to the warming gradient. While a significant decreasing trend was exhibited in both species diversity and size diversity for trees of all sizes and for adult trees along the warming gradient, no significant changes in seedlings were found, and the average basal area value was the highest for the warmest community. Our findings demonstrated that a short-range elevational gradient was adequate to separate the communities in species composition and structural diversity. Patterns of structural diversity along the warming gradient varied in size classes. The community at a higher elevation had more indicator species that were unique in separating the community from others. Principal component analysis showed that the first two principal components were negatively correlated with the warming index, indicating that warming destabilized species composition and community structure. Our study suggests that warming is the major driver of changes in structural diversity and species composition of woody plant communities in a subtropical broadleaved forest and that warming may promote tree productivity at the community level but reduce structural diversity at the quadrat level. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects—2nd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

22 pages, 14488 KiB  
Article
Improving Tree Cover Estimation for Sparse Trees Mixed with Herbaceous Vegetation in Drylands Using Texture Features of High-Resolution Imagery
by Haolin Huang, Zhihui Wang, Junjie Chen and Yonglei Shi
Forests 2024, 15(5), 847; https://doi.org/10.3390/f15050847 - 12 May 2024
Viewed by 1009
Abstract
Tree cover is a crucial vegetation structural parameter for simulating ecological, hydrological, and soil erosion processes on the Chinese Loess Plateau, especially after the implementation of the Grain for Green project in 1999. However, current tree cover products performed poorly across most of [...] Read more.
Tree cover is a crucial vegetation structural parameter for simulating ecological, hydrological, and soil erosion processes on the Chinese Loess Plateau, especially after the implementation of the Grain for Green project in 1999. However, current tree cover products performed poorly across most of the Loess Plateau, which is characterized by grasslands with sparse trees. In this study, we first acquired high-accuracy samples of 0.5 m tree canopy and 30 m tree cover using a combination of unmanned aerial vehicle imagery and WorldView-2 (WV-2) imagery. The spectral and textural features derived from Landsat 8 and WV-2 were then used to estimate tree cover with a random forest model. Finally, the tree cover estimated using WV-2, Landsat 8, and their combination were compared, and the optimal tree cover estimates were also compared with current products and tree cover derived from canopy classification. The results show that (1) the normalized difference moisture index using Landsat 8 shortwave infrared and the standard deviation of correlation metric calculated by means of gray-level co-occurrence matrix using the WV-2 near-infrared band are the optimal spectral feature and textural feature for estimating tree cover, respectively. (2) The accuracy of tree cover estimated using only WV-2 is highest (RMSE = 7.44%), indicating that high-resolution textural features are more sensitive to tree cover than the Landsat spectral features (RMSE = 11.53%) on grasslands with sparse trees. (3) Textural features with a resolution higher than 8 m perform better than the combination of Landsat 8 and textural features, and the optimal resolution is 2 m (RMSE = 7.21%) for estimating tree cover, whereas the opposite is observed when the resolution of textural features is lower than 8 m. (4) The current global product seriously underestimates tree cover on the Loess Plateau, and the tree cover calculation using the canopy classification of high-resolution imagery performs worse than the method of directly using remote sensing features. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Forest Cover Change and Its Ecological and Environmental Effects—2nd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-3
Back to TopTop