Emergent Trends in Managed Landscapes: Land Change, Forest Transformation, and Resource Management in the 21st Century

Dear Colleagues,

The 21^st century is witness to novel trends in land-cover change and associated management regimes concerned with rural and forested areas in the Global South. Globalization has transformed these managed landscapes, economically, biophysically, politically, and demographically, introducing new structures atop pre-existing dynamics. Myriad hybrid regimes of landscape change and management have arisen, entailing divergences from 20^th century norms in terms of their scale, pace, nature, agents, and geography. Emergent dynamics have variously given rise to unprecedented reforestation, deforestation, agro-industrialization, and conservation, often accompanied by an associated, emergent management regime, e.g., multi-lateral forest restoration initiatives, legislated land swaps of intact-forest for degraded-forest development sites, corporate self-regulation movements. Acute 21^st century pressures – particularly climate change and its mitigation, food insecurity, conservation and development – have fostered new roles for the State and commercial entities alike, reflecting the growing scales of emergent trends as well as the breadth of their implications. In some respects, the role of the State has expanded, albeit often via alignments with ascendant commercial interests, raising questions as to the potential for appropriate and adept management of rural and forested landscapes.

Descriptions of emergent land-change ‘events’ entailing forest gain, loss, or transformation in managed landscapes across the Global South have often characterized them as ends unto themselves, without regard to underlying historical or ensuing dynamics. In response, this special issue invites integrative perspectives on major emergent trends in land-use/cover change and associated political/economic management regimes across the Global South. Attention is given to lands and forests in rural or managed landscapes, the human dimensions of their development, emergent roles of the State and other relevant stakeholders influencing or reacting to novel trends, and to the concept of forest transformation – understood as the increasingly anthropogenic (i.e., managed, cultivated, intervened, planted) character of forest cover without corresponding major changes to overall forest area.

The following are promising, but non-exclusive, themes for contributions:

• Post forest-transition dynamics: How is new forest cover (including agro-forestry, planted forests, and natural regrowth) sustained, threatened, protected, perceived, and/or modified after arising in actively-managed landscapes?
• Historical legacies: How do novel trends in the geography, nature, and management of rural lands and managed forest areas reflect historical legacies of land-cover change and management? What are the implications for landscape management, environmental services?
• Management efficacy: In the context of emergent, large-scale trends in land use/cover change, how have the roles of landscape managers shifted, locally, nationally and globally? How has the role of the State shifted, particularly as other interests have become more ascendant, assertive, or relevant to emergent trends? Have managers ‘kept pace’ with the scale and pace of landscape change?  
• Forest transformations and ecosystem services: To what extent may ecosystem services return over the course of forest transformation? What are key determining factors over space and time? To what degree may forest restoration recover ecosystem services within human-managed landscapes at varying stages of transformation?
• How do we monitor and predict forest transformations ? : New advances in forest monitoring technologies both “in situ” and remote/proximal have increased spatial and temporal resolution at unprecedented detail. The use of such information is particularly valuable to detect human direct effects even at fine scales and hence understand better the dynamic and the drivers of current transformations. Also predicting tools in the form of models of various complexity, from detailed biogeochemistry models, to population dynamics and data driven algorithms are important to provide management solutions for the future. Contributions may be research papers, commentaries, or reviews.

Dr. Sean Sloan
Prof. Dr. Riccardo Valentini
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• reforestation
• resource management
• forest restoration
• landscape management
• sustainability
• Global South