March 21st is “International Day of Forests”, a day to raise awareness of the challenges facing forests in the modern era. This year’s theme is “Forests and Sustainable Cities”, focusing on the myriad of benefits that forests can bring in urban systems (more information can be found at http://www.un.org/en/events/forestsday/).

Forests feature prominently in many disciplines of science, given their role as a hub of biodiversity, as a sink for atmospheric carbon, their response to climate change, their impact on watersheds, and the dependence of an estimated 1.6 billion people on them for their livelihoods (and that is certainly not an exhaustive list!). At Nature Communications, we see work on forests that touches on these subjects and more, so we decided that International Day of Forests would be an excellent opportunity to showcase our publications in this area and provide a resource that would be of value to the community. 

Today, the Earth Sciences and Ecology teams at Nature Communications have launched three items related to forests. It is our hope that these will be valuable resources to researchers from across the many disciplines whose work relates to forests. 

(1) “Forests in the Anthropocene” Collection (go.nature.com/forests)

This is an open collection to showcase the wide variety of work that is published at Nature Communications on the subject of forests. The collection features four buckets that represent the multidisciplinary nature of research in forests. It will be regularly updated with new content. 

(2) Editorial - “At the Human-Forest Interface” (go.nature.com/forest_editorial)

The editorial gives a brief history of the relationship between humans and forests, before discussing the challenges in protecting them and their role in sustainable living.

(3) Comment from Theodore Endreny entitled “Strategically growing the urban forest will improve our world” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03622-0)

This comment was commissioned to give an overview of our understanding of the benefits and difficulties of urban forests, including the challenges in implementing them in city design. 

Please feel free to join the conversation using the official hashtag for International Day of Forests (#IntlForestDay)! Many thanks, and I hope you all enjoy the content as much as we did putting it together!

Izzy Andrew and Delphine Defforey 
Nature Communications