Dear colleagues,

The climate change situation presents significant potential risks to forests and requires rethinking traditional forest management practices. Thus, forest managers will need to plan at adequate temporal and spatial scales and adopt more adaptive and collaborative management approaches to meet future challenges. The characterization and mapping of forest variables is widely recognized as one of the most important topics that should be taken into consideration for adaptation and mitigation to climate change. ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning) has become an established method for accurately mapping some of the main stand-level forest variables at a local/regional scale, however its use may be economically prohibitive to generate forest information over large spatial scales. In recent years, the availability of global coverage of remote sensing auxiliary data has also increased rapidly, offering unique opportunities for the production of up-to-date large-scale forest resource estimates. Nowadays, the current and upcoming satellite missions like the ICESat-2, GEDI, Nisar (to be launched in 2023), Biomass (the ESA P-band radar Biomass mission) (to be launchedin2023), as well as the ongoing Copernicus EO data (Sentinel-2 (optical), Sentinel-1 (C-band)), and Palsar-2 (L-band), together with the National Forest Inventory dataset, offer an unparalleled opportunity to assess the current values and changes of the stand-level forest variables; providing up-and down-scaling opportunities.

The proposed Special Issue aims at studies covering different uses of multisource data integration (3D point clouds and/or remote sensing data) and multiscale approaches in forest sciences. Topics may cover anything from the classical estimation of forest variables at a tree or stand level, to more comprehensive aims and scales. Articles may address, but are not limited to the following topics:
•    Forests: impacts, effects, vulnerability or responses to climate change
•    Forest (flexible-adaptive) Planning and Management
•    Forest Change
•    Forest Mapping and Pattern Analysis
•    Forest Ecosystem Services (monitoring)
•    Forest Monitoring
•    Increasing Forest Resilience

Prof. Dr. Sandra Buján
Guest Editor

Forests: Impacts, Effects, Vulnerability or Responses to Climate Change; Forest (flexible-adaptive) Planning and Management; Forest Change; Forest Mapping and Pattern Analysis; Forest Ecosystem Services (monitoring); Forest Monitoring; Increasing Forest Resilience