Dear colleagues,

It is with immense pleasure that we announce the 1st International Electronic Conference on Forests:

Forests for a Better Future: Sustainability, Innovation, Interdisciplinarity

Forests and forestry activities provide an opportunity to address the pressing challenge of climate change through sustainable production. Forests also play a strategic role in mitigating critical issues, including biodiversity conservation, water regulation, energy efficiency, pollution reduction and mitigation, production of raw biological materials, food safety, and human and ecosystem health and poverty.

Forests contribute to the improvement of some important development issues focused on sustainability and responsible forest management as a shared and essential factor to address global challenges and guarantee the conservation and enhancement of the global forest heritage as well as the socio-economic development of production, environmental, and socio-cultural chains.

The global pandemic has forced us to reduce travel and to reflect on our ability to leave scientific acquisitions as a legacy to future generations. This reduced mobility stimulates us to maintain connections with the scientific network using emerging technologies. This conference is an opportunity to communicate our shared passion for forests, forest products and services, and forest biodiversity.

The conference will discuss the state of the art of forestry operations, wood supply chains, and ecosystem services, and objectives for the future will be sought. Sharing and discussing the latest research findings with the global community of scientists in the field of forests is the central purpose of this virtual meeting.

We invite you to join us with your work and be part of this exciting experience.

Topics of the conference include:

1. Forest Ecology, Management and Restoration
2. Forest Genetics, Ecophysiology and Biology
3. Forests and Urban Forest Sustainability
4. Forest Inventory, Quantitative Methods and Remote Sensing
5. Wood Science, Production Chains and Fuelwood
6. Forest Operations and Engineering
7. Fire Risks and Other Natural Hazards

While our virtual conference will be a different experience from the traditional gatherings we all know and love, this virtual conference will allow us to connect in new ways while keeping our carbon footprints low and maintaining social distancing. Your presentation will be accessible to hundreds of researchers around the world. Hopefully, it will be a more inclusive and sustainable way of meeting because of the lack of taxes and travel costs.

This conference, for now virtual, is a commitment to a “physical” meeting, which we hope will take place in the very near future.

We warmly invite our colleagues from across the world to be part of this exciting event.

Hoping for a next forest (“in situ”) workshop.

Forests foster future!

Dr. Angela Lo Monaco
Dr. Cate Macinnis-Ng
Prof. Dr. Om P. Rajora

Chairs of the 1st International Electronic Conference on Forests

Conference Secretariat

Sponsoring Opportunities

For information regarding sponsoring opportunities, please contact the conference secretariat(gris.guo@mdpi.com).

Authors should make submissions online by registering at www.sciforum.net and using the "New Submission" function once logged into the system.

1. Scholars are encouraged to participate in the conference with their research results. It is required that a short abstract (about 200–300 words) of the research needs to be submitted online by 30 September 2020.
2. The Conference Committee will notify authors of the acceptance of their abstract by 10 October 2020.
3. In the case of acceptance, authors will be asked to submit the extended version of abstract for the conference proceedings, with the option to include presentation slides or a video presentation of their abstract. If authors do not want to publish a proceedings paper, they are also encouraged to only present posters/presentation slides/videos with an accompanying short abstract, and these files will be available online on this website during and after the e-conference. However, they will not be added to the proceedings of the conference. All files should be submitted online by 31 October 2020.
4. All accepted extended abstracts will be published as one dedicated volume in MDPI Environmental Sciences Proceedings (ISSN 2673-4931 , https://www.mdpi.com/journal/environsciproc).
5. The proceedings papers, presentations and posters will be available on https://sciforum.net/conference/IECF2020 for discussion and rating during the time of the conference (15–30 November 2020).
6. The open access journal Forests will set up a conference Special Issue to publish full paper versions of proceedings papers or abstracts(https://www.mdpi.com/journal/forests/special_issues/iecf2020).
7. The authors are encouraged to submit the full paper to the conference Special Issue after their accepted submission becomes available on the conference website.

If authors would like to publish their research in the conference proceedings, the extended version of abstract is compulsory. The extended version of the abstract for the proceedings issue must have the following structure:

First page:

• Title
• Full author names
• Affiliations (including full postal address) and authors' e-mail addresses
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results and Discussion
• Conclusions
• (Acknowledgments)
• References

Manuscripts should be prepared in MS Word or any other word processor and should be converted to PDF format before submission. The publication format will be PDF. The manuscript should be at least three pages (including figures, tables and references). Although there is no page limit on the length, it is recommended not to exceed 6 pages. Authors are asked to keep their papers as concise as possible.

Authors are encouraged to prepare a presentation in PowerPoint, or similar software, to be displayed online along with the manuscript. Slides, if available, will be displayed directly on the website https://sciforum.net/conference/IECF2020 using the proprietary slide viewer. Slides can be prepared in the same way as for any traditional conference where research results are presented. Slides should be converted to PDF format before submission so that they can easily and automatically be converted for online display.

Besides their active participation within the forum, authors are also encouraged to submit video presentations. This is a unique way of presenting your paper and discussing it with peers from all over the world. Make a difference and join us in this project!

The video should be no longer than 10 minutes and be prepared in one of the following formats: .MOV; .MPEG4; .MP4; .AVI; .WMV; .MPEGPS; .FLV. Once it is ready, please submit it to us via iecf2020@mdpi.com before 31 October 2020 (submission deadline for full files), and we will upload it for you.

Posters will be available on the conference website during and after the event. As with papers presented at the conference, participants will be able to ask questions and make comments about the posters. Posters that are submitted without a paper will not be included in the proceedings of the conference.
If you decide to submit a poster instead of proceedings paper, please select “Poster Section” when you submit the short abstract. After acceptance, please upload a copy of the short abstract as PDF and Word files, in the corresponding fields, and upload the Poster PDF in the field “Presentation PDF (optional)”.

Submission: Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.sciforum.net/login by registering and logging in.

Accepted File Formats

• MS Word: Manuscripts prepared in MS Word must be converted into a single file before submission. When preparing manuscripts in MS Word, the Electronic Conference on Forests Microsoft Word template file (see download below) must be used. Please do not insert any graphics (schemes, figures, etc.) into a movable frame, as this can superimpose the text and make the layout very difficult.

• LaTeX: Manuscripts prepared in LaTeX must be collated into one ZIP folder (include all source files and images so that the Conference Secretariat can recompile the submitted PDF). When preparing manuscripts in LaTeX, please use the provided LaTeX template file.

The 1st International Electronic Conference on Forests Microsoft Word template file and LaTeX template file

Microsoft Word template
LaTeX template

Paper Format: Papers should be in A4 paper format, with a printing area of 17.5 cm × 26.2 cm. The margins should be 1.75 cm on each side of the paper (top, bottom, left, and right sides).

• Formatting/Style: Papers should be prepared following the style of Forests. The full titles and the cited papers must be given. Reference numbers should be placed in square brackets and placed before the punctuation; for example, [1,2], [3] or [1–3]. All the references should be listed separately in full detail as the last section at the end of the manuscript.

• Author List and Affiliation Format: Authors' full first and last names must be given. Abbreviated middle names can be added. For papers written by various contributors, a corresponding author must be designated. The PubMed/MEDLINE format is used for affiliations: complete street address information, including city, zip code, state/province and country, and email address should be added. All authors who contributed significantly to the manuscript (including writing a section) should be listed on the first page of the manuscript, below the title of the article. Other parties who provided only minor contributions should be listed under Acknowledgments only. A minor contribution might be a discussion with the author, reading through the draft of the manuscript, or performing English corrections.

• Figures, Schemes and Tables: Authors are encouraged to prepare figures and schemes in color. Full-color graphics will be published free of charge. Figures and schemes must be numbered (Figure 1, Scheme I, Figure 2, Scheme II, etc.) and an explanatory title must be added. Tables should be numbered, titled and inserted into the main text. All table columns should have an explanatory heading. Please supply legends for all figures, schemes and tables. The legends should be prepared as a separate paragraph of the main text and placed in the main text before a table, a figure or a scheme.

For further inquiries, please contact us at iecf2020@mdpi.com.

It is the authors' responsibility to identify and declare any personal circumstances or interests that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of clinical research. If there is no conflict, please state here "The authors declare no conflict of interest." This should be conveyed in a separate "Conflict of Interest" statement preceding the "Acknowledgments" and "References" sections at the end of the manuscript. Financial support for the study must be fully disclosed under the "Acknowledgments" section.

MDPI, the publisher of the Sciforum.net platform, is an open access publisher. We believe that authors should retain the copyright to their scholarly works. Hence, by submitting a paper to this conference, you retain the copyright of your paper, but you grant MDPI the non-exclusive right to publish this paper online on the Sciforum.net platform. This means you can easily submit your paper to any scientific journal at a later stage and transfer the copyright to its publisher (if required by that publisher).

Full paper versions of accepted submissions are encouraged to be submitted to the conference Special Issue after the conference. These full papers should be novel and significantly different from the proceeding papers. These papers will be subject to peer review after they are submitted using journal submission system (https://susy.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload).