Object: projected contribution to a Forest Ecology & Management special issue connected to the WC IUFRO Session: “Advances towards more accurate forest biodiversity indicators and monitoring”

Dear Colleagues,

We will be organizing a session on “Advances towards more accurate forest biodiversity indicators and monitoring” (T3.1) during the next IUFRO 2024 congress in Stockholm – to which you are very much welcome to attend.

As an add-on to this session, we are planning to edit a special issue in Forest Ecology and Management (FEM) that would gather presentations coming from this session – as well as other papers on the same topic (cf. text describing the expected special issue in PS2 below). To move forward with FEM, we need a list of confirmed authors and titles.

Therefore, if you plan to publish a paper in this overall topic within the next months (before end of January 2025), and if you are interested to publish it in this special issue, please let us know as soon as possible and no later than 12 July 2024 by providing us tentative list of authors, title and some words on the fit of the proposal with the special issue (topic, FEM scope, scientific content, novelty). We especially welcome proposals from outside Europe – since the presentations in our session will mostly come from Europe. Answers should be sent to frederic.gosselin@inrae.fr. Submitted manuscripts will of course go through the classical reviewing process of FEM.

We thank you very much in advance and are looking forward to meeting you in Stockholm.

All the best,

Frédéric Gosselin, Anna Barbati, Francesco Chianucci, Marion Gosselin, Sabina Burrascano

PS: apologies for cross posting!

PS2: provisional text of the special issue:

                             Special issue on Forest Biodiversity indicators and monitoring

We are seeking papers connected with the issues discussed during the T3.1 session “Advances towards more accurate forest biodiversity indicators and monitoring” of IUFRO 2024 world congress in Stockholm. The focus of the session is the improvement of forest biodiversity indicators and monitoring across the world. Different systems of reporting at regional or national levels have proposed different sets of indicators of forest biodiversity, often based only on already available dendrometric data, rather than on the occurrence and abundance of organisms across multiple taxonomic groups. However, there is increasing evidence to suggest that different taxonomic groups respond in different ways to forest management and environmental pressures, such as climate change or invasive species. Recent scientific advances in different disciplines may substantially improve the existing indicators and monitoring strategies. In this special issue, we will particularly welcome contributions investigating:

i) the development of new biodiversity measurement tools, methods and approaches (e.g., DNA metabarcoding, acoustic recordings, image analysis, remote sensing, spectranomics);

ii) the evaluation of existing or novel indicators, especially through their relationships to the indicandum;

iii) the evaluation of indicators’ understanding by different stakeholders – especially forest managers;

iv) the test and development of monitoring schemes (e.g., combination of Remote Sensing and in-situ field data to retrieve Essential Biodiversity Variables – EBVs), or of the integration of information through statistical modeling across taxonomic groups, data and indicator types.

We aim at hosting in this special issue a range of studies covering different perspectives over the general topic of improving existing forest biodiversity indicators and monitoring schemes, with a particular focus on forest management.

Frédéric GOSSELIN

frederic.gosselin@inrae.fr

Ingénieur (IGPEF, HDR) en écologie forestière & biométrie

UR EFNO - INRAE

Domaine des Barres

F-45290 Nogent-sur-Vernisson

Tél. : +33 2 38 95 03 58

www.inrae.fr