Forest Productivity, Carbon Dynamics and Eco-Environmental Response: Potential, Development and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

Forests play a vital role in sustainable development, ensuring human well-being, a healthy environment, and economic development, while their ecosystems play an important role in supporting a green economy; mitigating climate change; protecting biodiversity; improving water quality; combating desertification; supporting global carbon, nutrient, and water cycles; and temperature regulation in human living environments. As the main body of terrestrial ecosystems, forests function as massive carbon sinks and play an important role in adaptation to global climate change. Remote-sensing technology has evolved rapidly over the past few decades, with new sensors and methods contributing to the generation of updated and highly detailed information for supporting forest management and planning. Remote-sensing technology can be used to estimate the carbon storage of forests’ aboveground biomass and soil and coupled with ecosystem models to simulate the carbon cycle of forest ecosystems. Forests are important contributors to terrestrial biomass productivity and carbon storage, and provide many ecosystem services that benefit humans, including climate regulation, the production of forest products, the provision of important raw materials, and the conservation of biodiversity. Given the scale and size of plantations, forest systems are threatened by traditional monitoring methods, which highlights the need to identify other methods to aid the management of forest systems.

This Topic encourages empirical and theoretical papers from the fields of environmental, geographical, and remote-sensing science, aiming to provide new technologies and methods to support the sustainable use of forest ecosystem services. Papers with interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Advances in ecosystem modeling for estimating forest variables and addressing forest-mapping issues based on the integration of remotely sensed and in situ data;
• Recent advances in optical remote sensing for the assessment of carbon storage and sequestration, and trends in biodiversity in forest ecosystems;
• The environmental impacts of forestry and related industries in relation to supply chains;
• Integrated assessment tools, such as environmental impact assessments and sustainability impact assessments, with which to quantify the impact of alternative forest management practices;
• Papers on current and relevant issues in monitoring forest inventories and management using remote sensing or remote-sensing-based products.

Prof. Dr. Huaqiang Du
Prof. Dr. Dengsheng Lu
Prof. Dr. Huaguo Huang
Prof. Dr. Mingshi Li
Dr. Yanjun Su
Topic Editors