Designing Future Urban Forests

Dear Colleagues,

Background: Urban land cover is predicted to triple globally by the year 2030, leading to a variety of environmental impacts, including forest fragmentation and loss, and declines in native biodiversity and the various benefits provided by forests. With more than half of the human population now residing in urban landscapes, a question emerges: can we design, construct, and manage built, urban environments to deliver the same ecological benefits and services as those provided by forests? Currently, the design of these built environments largely focuses on aesthetics rather than functionality, as evidenced by the increased maintenance costs, shorter plant life expectancy, and limited ecological benefits caused by poor tree and plant species selection. Given the degree to which human perception, choice, and markets drive plant community composition and vegetation management in built, urban landscapes, such research needs to at least consider, if not embrace, social, economic, and ecological components of urban ecosystems. The editors view this challenge as an opportunity to reimagine built, urban landscapes that contribute to, rather than hinder, conservation of biodiversity and the important benefits that humans receive from nature, particularly forests.

Papers Solicited: We welcome papers that address all aspects of designing, constructing, and managing built, urban landscapes and remnant urban natural areas to ensure these systems provide urbanites with the long-term benefits provided by forests. Papers can be on synthesis/reviews, empirical, or modeling studies. This topic requires interdisciplinary thinking. Thus, we welcome papers focusing on environmental, ecological, social, economic, policy, and a mixture of these topics. While studies need not be interdisciplinary, we do request that authors address interdisciplinary considerations of their work in the paper’s discussion.  

Prof. Dr. Michael Andreu
Prof. Dr. Basil V. Iannone
Prof. Dr. Ryan W. Klein
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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.