Forests in a Changing Climate: Adaptive Silviculture, Agroforestry and Ecosystem Restoration for Resilient Landscapes

Forests are central to global carbon cycles, to biodiversity, and to the livelihoods of billions of people. Yet rising temperatures, shifting rainfall, and intensifying disturbance are outpacing the way many forests and tree-based systems are managed today. Meeting this challenge calls for management that is not only sustainable, but adaptive — able to anticipate change, recover from shocks, and restore what has been lost.

Agroforestry and adaptive silviculture sit at the heart of this shift. Together with wider nature-based solutions, they offer practical routes to store carbon, safeguard biodiversity, rebuild degraded land, and keep forests productive under uncertainty. There is a lot of literature available; however, progress has been made in some areas of the globe and remains scarce in others, and it rarely connects field-scale practice to landscape- and climate-scale outcomes.

This Research Topic aims to bring new knowledge together to fill these gaps. We welcome original research, reviews, methods, and perspectives that advance climate-resilient management, agroforestry, and restoration across temperate, tropical, and mountain systems. We especially encourage work that links management decisions to measurable outcomes — for carbon, biodiversity, soil and water, and the communities who depend on forests.

Themes include, but are not limited to:

(i) Adaptive silviculture for resilience: species and provenance selection, regeneration, assisted migration, and disturbance recovery;
(ii) Agroforestry system design and performance under climate stress;
(iii) Carbon sequestration and greenhouse-gas dynamics in managed and tree-based systems;
(iv) Biodiversity and agrobiodiversity conservation;
(v) Restoration of degraded land and progress toward land-degradation neutrality;
(vi) Modelling and decision-support tools;
(vii) Socio-economic dimensions, policy, and local and Indigenous knowledge.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Agroforestry, adaptive silviculture, climate resilience, ecosystem restoration, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, sustainable forest management, nature-based solutions, land degradation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.