Long-term Ecological Evidence and Forecasting for Adaptive Ecosystem-Based Forest Management under Global Change: Transhemispheric Perspectives

Global change is reshaping forest ecosystems through climate change, biological invasions, altered disturbance regimes, and increasing human pressures. These drivers challenge ecosystem resilience, alter successional pathways, and threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services. Adaptive ecosystem-based forest management (EBFM) has become a central framework for conserving ecological integrity while supporting human well-being. However, its implementation is often constrained by management decisions based on short-term observations that fail to capture uncertain long-term ecosystem dynamics, historical variability, and ecological thresholds. Long-term ecological evidence—including permanent forest plots, paleoecological archives, dendrochronology, historical records, and remote sensing time series—provides the temporal perspective needed to understand historical ecosystem trajectories. To anticipate change, forecasting methods are required to identify promising resilient management strategies. By comparing forests across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, this Research Topic seeks to identify general principles and transferable approaches that strengthen adaptive EBFM under accelerating global change.

This Research Topic aims to bring together theoretical, methodological, and applied studies demonstrating how long-term ecological evidence and forecasting can improve adaptive EBFM under global change. We welcome contributions that advance our understanding of forest resilience, historical variability, disturbance dynamics, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem services across temperate forests and other forest biomes.

Specifically, this collection seeks to: (i) identify common patterns in forest responses to climate change, biological invasions, and other emerging stressors across Northern and Southern Hemisphere forests; (ii) improve the understanding of resilience thresholds, ecological tipping points, and ecosystem transformation through long-term ecological perspectives; (iii) evaluate innovative approaches for detecting, monitoring, and forecasting ecosystem change across spatial and temporal scales; and (iv) translate ecological knowledge into operational strategies that support adaptive EBFM under increasing environmental uncertainty.

By integrating long-term evidence with innovative analytical approaches, this Research Topic aims to bridge ecological research and conservation practice, providing science-based guidance for resilient forest management in a rapidly changing world.

This Research Topic welcomes original research, reviews, methodological papers, and perspectives exploring how long-term ecological evidence can inform adaptive EBFM under global change. Although the focus is on temperate forests, comparative studies from other forest biomes are encouraged.

The scope covers three complementary themes: (1) long-term forest dynamics and resilience, including historical range of variability, ecological tipping points, novel ecosystems, and vegetation dynamics reconstructed from permanent plots, paleoecological proxies, dendrochronology, historical records, remote sensing, or modelling; (2) methodological advances for detecting and forecasting ecosystem change through resilience indicators, ecosystem service assessments, multi-source data integration, uncertainty analysis, and innovative modelling; and (3) applications of adaptive EBFM, including disturbance-based management, restoration, conservation planning, governance, policy, and the integration of Indigenous and local knowledge to enhance forest resilience under global change.