Scope

 People and Forests is a specialty section in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. This section is concerned with how forests and people interact at various levels, from local to global, providing new and interesting perspectives based on research in any discipline and across forest biomes.  This encompasses research on how forests affect people and their livelihoods, as well as how people affect forest cover and quality.   

 We invite manuscripts reporting on novel approaches and findings that have the potential to impact science, policy and practice.  The main criteria for publication are that papers are innovative and provide new and refreshing perspectives on the relationships between people and forests.  This potentially includes negative results that reject well-founded hypotheses.  Authors should draw out the broader implications of their research through the theoretical framing and discussion, rather than focusing on particular statistics such as the fraction of income derived from forests or the average treatment effect of an intervention.

 The section will also contribute to the body of evidence on the interactions between forests and people by publishing short articles that replicate previous methods and results in new sites.  All articles must provide the full set of information on methods, study site, and findings typically extracted for systematic reviews.  That is, we are explicitly seeking to address the “file drawer problem” which refers to the bias introduced into the scientific literature by selective publication, chiefly by a tendency to publish positive outcomes but not to publish negative or non-confirmatory results.

 Articles in this section are expected to cover a wide range of issues related to forests, their role in local communities and broader society, and how the interactions between people and forests are moderated by and influence global change.  Areas of interest include, but are not restricted to: forests sustaining agriculture, local perceptions of ecosystem services including cultural ecosystem services; linkages between forests and human health including nutrition; climate change mitigation and adaptation, including innovative finance mechanisms and interventions that promote broader landscape perspectives for sustainable forest management. 

Submission

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