Dear Colleagues,

Forests are crucial to supporting life on our planet. More broadly, the forest sector plays a vital role in global economics, with an estimated 20% of the global population who depend on forests for their livelihoods. Forest ecosystems also play a critical role in regulating global carbon and hydrological cycles—an integral part of nature-based solutions to addressing needs such as adapting to and mitigating impacts from global climate change, and supporting 80% of all biodiversity on land.

The contribution of forest ecosystems and forest resource management to poverty alleviation has been increasingly emphasized in international policy under the domain of conservation and development. The three international instruments—the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN Strategic Plan for Forests, and the Paris Agreement—provide an interconnected structure for international cooperation to conserve forests, fight climate change, and ensure a sustainable future for all. The SDG 15 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes several targets related to forests. Forests also contribute to the achievement of other SDG goals that include SDG 1 (no poverty), SDG 2 (zero hunger), SDG 3 (good health and well-being), SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation), and SDG 13 (climate action). Therefore, improved forest conservation and management practice is an essential means to fulfill the mandate of the three Rio Conventions (Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification) through Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) activities, and is thus central to the implementation of key international decisions such as the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration of Forests, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, the Land Degradation Neutrality goal, and the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests.

Forest conservation includes a broad range of activities from in-situ conservation and management to global action to combat deforestation and forest degradation, restoring degraded forests. Systematically understanding and assessing the performance of forest conservation efforts across scales remain major challenges, but are essential for monitoring, targeting, and efficiently allocating resources, evaluating results and generating evidence for policymaking. Measuring the results of forest conservation efforts ranges from ground-based approaches using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods to a combination of remote sensing approaches, combined with field data and mixed-methods.

This Special Issue aims to highlight the good practices, innovations, challenges, synergies, and tradeoffs in measuring the outcomes of forest conservation. This Special Issue invites papers on one or more of the following topics:

• Baseline, leakage, and other measurement challenges in forest measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV);
• Indigenous and local knowledge and forest conservation and community-based monitoring and measurement;
• Innovations and good practices in measuring forest conservation interventions;
• Forest conservation measurement including synergies for SDGs, UNFCCC, UNCCD and other global commitments that rely on forest conservation;
• Role of forest measurement in biodiversity conservation, climate change, and poverty alleviation.

Dr. Anupam Anand
Dr. Hao Tang
Dr. Radhika Dave
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.

• forest conservation and measurement
• forest governance, science and policy
• sustainable development goals
• remote sensing and geospatial approaches
• mixed-methods
• measurement, reporting and verification (MRV)