Forests and Soils: Sustainable Products and Ecosystem Services for Human Well-Being

At the scale of human life, soil is a non-renewable resource, and forests, one of the major land-cover types of the Planet, are a multipurpose, complex and self-regenerating type of ecosystem. The comprehension of soil related processes, soil-tree relationships, forest dynamics and management in different environments is fundamental, especially in the context of global change, to guarantee a sustainable use of forest products (i.e., timber or wood energy) and to provide a broad range of ecosystem services. A reliable economic assessment of sustainable forest management and of ecosystem services is useful to setup state or intergovernmental policies promoting habitat conservation and/or increasing people’s socio-economic perspectives. Here we blend different research experiences on forest and environmental sectors. Future challenges should direct forest research focusing on non-renewable resources (soil, water, air), their functional changes due to forest management and product use, and on the externalization of those ecosystem services not yet accounted for.