About Forest Ecosystems

Forest Ecosystems

Forest Ecosystems is an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal based in Beijing, China, devoted to the ecology and management of forest ecosystems worldwide. It is managed and financed by Beijing Forestry University. Its first issue appeared in 2014, published in cooperation with SpringerOpen, and the contents of its first eight volumes were published with Springer. It is now published by KeAi, with publishing services by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi Communications, and copyright held by Beijing Forestry University. Its online ISSN is 2197-5620. The journal publishes scientific communications from any discipline that can contribute to understanding the structure and dynamics of natural and domesticated forest ecosystems and their services to people — forest ecology, silviculture, forest carbon and biodiversity, remote sensing of forests, and the impacts of climate change among them. It is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and in Scopus.

A first issue in 2014, from Beijing Forestry University

The launch editorial of Forest Ecosystems, published in its first issue in 2014, introduces the journal as a peer-reviewed, international open-access journal managed and financed by Beijing Forestry University and published in cooperation with SpringerOpen. The editorial office was in Beijing: the editorial named Dr Li Hui as managing editor, working at the editorial office in Beijing with its director, Dr Zhao XiuHai. The first editorial board included 30 distinguished scientists from 13 countries — ecologists, economists, modellers and an environmental consultant — signalling from the outset that the journal intended to be international in authorship and readership, not only a university house journal.

The seed for this profile notes that the journal succeeded earlier Beijing Forestry University English titles. Its own launch framing is consistent with that role: a Beijing forestry university creating a modern, paperless, open-access English journal — the launch editorial stresses a publication process in which all published articles may be freely downloaded and permanently archived — to carry its discipline to an international audience. Volume numbering confirms the chronology: volume 1 is the 2014 volume, volumes 1 to 8 were published with Springer, volume 8 corresponds to 2021, and the journal's volume sequence continues from there under its new publisher.

Why a journal of forest ecosystems, and why then

The founders set out their reasoning in the launch editorial under four questions — why, what, how and who. On the 'why', they observed that forest ecosystems are characterised by long time frames, multiple services, useful products and many stakeholders, and argued that a journal devoted to a broader view in forest science could make a significant contribution to scholarly publishing. The gap they identified was not a shortage of forestry journals, but a shortage of venues treating the forest as an ecosystem in full — its structure, its dynamics, its organisms and its services to people — rather than only as a timber resource or a collection of individual trees.

That founding argument has only strengthened with time. Forests sit at the centre of climate policy because of the carbon they store, at the centre of biodiversity policy because of the species they shelter, and at the centre of land-use conflict because of the products and services people draw from them. A journal founded in 2014 to study forest ecosystems as integrated systems was positioned, deliberately, at the intersection of ecology, management and public discourse — the launch editorial says journal contents should be open to argument and evidence being tested in scholarly and public debate.

Scope: structure, dynamics and services of forests

The journal's current aims and scope describe it as an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing scientific communications from any discipline that can provide interesting contributions about the structure and dynamics of 'natural' and 'domesticated' forest ecosystems, and their services to people. It welcomes innovative science as well as application-oriented work that will enhance understanding of woody plant communities. Highly specific studies are also encouraged, particularly when they form part of a thematic series offering universally relevant perspectives.

The launch editorial filled out that scope with examples that remain recognisable in the journal today: ecological studies covering natural and man-made forests; forest insects, birds and herbivores; and forest fires and pests. In other words, the journal's forest includes the trees, the animals and insects that live among them, the disturbances that reshape them, the people who manage and use them, and the models and measurements by which all of that is understood. The seed's summary of its coverage — forest ecology, silviculture, forest carbon and biodiversity, remote sensing, and climate-change impacts — sits squarely inside that published scope.

Climate change, carbon and management

Climate change and forest management form one of the journal's most active research fronts. A study highlighted by KeAi applied a transition matrix growth model to simulate the effects of various management strategies on forest ecosystem services and multifunctionality under climate change, using forests in Jilin Province in northeastern China. Its first author, Xue Du, explained that such models are widely used because their simple structure makes long-term predictions possible for forests with complex structures; the study found that an upper-storey thinning strategy at modest intensity improved forest multifunctionality across all climate scenarios examined, by more than 20 per cent over the lowest values. The corresponding author, Xiangdong Lei, concluded that ecosystem services and multifunctionality can be enhanced through appropriate management measures amid a changing climate.

That example captures the journal's characteristic contribution: not climate research in the abstract, and not management advice in the abstract, but the modelling and measurement of what specific management choices do to specific forest services under specific climate futures. Carbon storage, biodiversity, water, timber and resilience can rise or fall together depending on those choices, and the journal provides a venue where the trade-offs are quantified.

From SpringerOpen to KeAi and Elsevier

The journal's publishing history has two chapters. The contents of volumes 1 to 8 were published with Springer, through SpringerOpen, and that archive remains available and fully searchable on the SpringerOpen site, which now states that Forest Ecosystems is no longer published by SpringerOpen and hosts the archive of articles published during its time there. The journal then moved to KeAi: its current ScienceDirect pages record copyright held by Beijing Forestry University, with publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. Its KeAi journal site carries its news, reviewer acknowledgements and article highlights.

The continuity through that transition matters for readers and authors. The ISSN — 2197-5620 — is unchanged, the volume sequence continues without a break (volume 9 in 2022 through to the volumes of the mid-2020s), and the sponsoring institution, Beijing Forestry University, remains the journal's owner throughout. What changed was the production and platform partner, from SpringerOpen to the KeAi–Elsevier arrangement used by a number of Chinese society and university journals.

Indexing and standing

The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and in Scopus, as recorded in the seed for this profile and reflected in its Journal Citation Reports presence in the forestry category. Its editorial community is internationally recognised: KeAi reported that 27 members of its editorial board were selected among the world's top 2 per cent of scientists in the 2023 listing it publicised. The journal publicly thanks its reviewers each year — its acknowledgements to reviewers for 2025 were published in January 2026 — a small but telling sign of an active, functioning peer-review community rather than a nominal one.

Its special issues and collections show its current fronts. Recent collections listed by the publisher include work on transitioning to continuous cover forestry in times of climate change and energy crisis, and collections arising from a 2024 workshop on forest structure, guest-edited by specialists in forest measurement and remote sensing, including editors associated with lidar and quantitative structure work. A journal whose collections span continuous-cover silviculture and laser-scanning of forest canopies is covering its field from the forest floor to the satellite.

Remote sensing and the measured forest

Remote sensing deserves separate attention in this journal's profile because it has become one of the principal ways forest ecosystems are now studied. The journal's Springer-era archive includes work on forest disturbances attributed from yearly Landsat time series over 1990–2020 in the Hengduan Mountains of southwest China, and on determinants of insect pest assemblages in alpine forest ecosystems of western China — studies in which satellite records and field ecology are combined across decades and mountain landscapes. Its recent forest-structure collections are guest-edited by researchers known for terrestrial and airborne laser scanning, signalling continued strength in quantitative measurement of tree architecture, biomass and canopy structure.

For a journal about ecosystems, this measurement revolution matters. Carbon accounting, biodiversity monitoring and climate-impact assessment all depend on being able to observe forests repeatedly, at scale, and to connect those observations to ecological process. Forest Ecosystems publishes both sides of that connection: the sensing and modelling methods, and the ecological conclusions drawn from them.

Who reads and writes for it

Contributors and readers include forest ecologists, silviculturists, forest modellers and economists, remote-sensing scientists, entomologists and wildlife researchers, and forest managers looking for evidence. The launch board's mix — ecologists, economists, modellers and an environmental consultant, from 13 countries — foreshadowed that breadth. Although the journal is owned by a Beijing university and much of its research concerns Chinese forests, its stated remit is forest ecosystems worldwide, and its pages include natural and managed forests on other continents; KeAi's news coverage, for example, has highlighted its work on how biomass and diversity in Africa's dry forests have been vastly underestimated, and on drought impacts revealing species-specific adaptation differences.

For policy readers, the journal is useful precisely because it refuses to separate ecology from services. A paper on thinning intensity is simultaneously a paper about carbon, habitat and yield; a paper on dry-forest biomass revises the numbers on which continental carbon budgets rest.

How to access it

The journal is open access: current articles are freely available through its ScienceDirect presence, and the volumes 1–8 archive is freely available through SpringerOpen. Readers should use the online ISSN 2197-5620 when searching library catalogues and databases, and the standard abbreviation For. Ecosyst. appears in citation styles for the journal. Authors should consult the current author instructions on the journal's KeAi and ScienceDirect pages, including its guidance on thematic series, since the journal particularly encourages specific studies that form part of a thematic series with broadly relevant perspectives.

Place in this directory

Forest Ecosystems is listed here as a magazine and journal outlet from Beijing, China. Founded with a first issue in 2014, managed and financed by Beijing Forestry University, published first with SpringerOpen and now with KeAi and Elsevier, and indexed in SCI-Expanded and Scopus, it covers the ecology and management of forest ecosystems worldwide — forest ecology, silviculture, carbon and biodiversity, remote sensing and climate-change impacts. Paired in this batch with the longer-established Journal of Forestry Research from Harbin, it represents the newer, ecosystem-centred wing of Chinese forestry publishing: a journal created in the open-access era to ask not only how forests grow, but what they do — for the climate, for wildlife and for people — and how management changes the answer.