New Challenges

New Challenges

Dear foresters, dear readers,

The past couple of years have been more than challenging for the whole world and not only for forestry community. The increasing number of climate extremes and destabilization of timber-supply chains in pandemic time brought more focus on biodiversity and forest management, stressed the vulnerability of forests to pests, showed the importance of urban forests during restricted travelling and highlighted the flexibility of forests and trees because of the rising number of stressors.

Over the past 17 years of continuous development and improvement of CROJFE, many events have given a positive feedback to the journal. Special attention should be given to FORMEC network and IUFRO Division 3 »Forest Operations Engineering and Management«, two strong partners always giving a positive impulse to the journal. CROJFE started cooperation with the FORMEC International Network in 2010, whereby FORMEC International Network became the co-publisher of the journal. Due to impacts of COVID-19, the 53rd annual meeting of the International Symposium on Forest Mechan (FORMEC) joint with the Council on Forest Engineering (COFE) originally scheduled for September 27–30, 2020 in Corvallis, Oregon, USA has been rescheduled to a virtual meeting in September 2021. This year's international meeting is the in-person forum combining the International Symposium on Forest Mechanization (FORMEC), the Council on Forest Engineering (COFE) and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) Division 3 under the title »One Big Family – Shaping Our Future Together« with a focus on building a strong community of forest engineering across continents and sectors.

Today's FORMEC conferences are the largest annual events in the field of forestry engineering for all scientists, teachers and operational foresters involved in forest engineering, but smaller, local events should not be neglected either. One example is the international conference to be held in Zalesina, Croatia from 14–16 September, 2022 under the title »Forest Engineering – Current Situation and Future Challenges«. This is the seventh year of the conference, which brings together academics and professionals of forest engineering from Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Croatia. Accepted papers, after the review process, will be published in the journal Nova mehanizacija šumarstva (New Forest Engineering), this journal and Croatian Journal of Forest Engineering (CROJFE) being the successors of the journal Mehanizacija šumarstva (Forest Engineering).

From the starting volumes of the journal, in which five to six papers were published per issue, today the number of published papers per issue is around fifteen, which is indirectly connected with one of the long term goals of CROJFE and that is – positioning the journal as one of the leading journals of forest engineering in the world. This brings responsibility requiring the increase in quality of published scientific papers and an opportunity to present forest engineering on a higher scale and to a wider public. Another positive example of presenting forest engineering is the ongoing international Erasmus+ project »Technodiversity: Harmonizing European education in forest engineering by implementing an e-learning platform to support adaptation and evaluation of forest operations«. The project is financed by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union and the members of the project team are:

Þ Dresden University of Technology, Germany (leader)

Þ Poznań University of Life Sciences, Poland

Þ National Research Council, Italy

Þ Transilvania University of Brașov, Romania

Þ University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria

Þ Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden

Þ Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology University of Zagreb, Croatia

Þ Technological Institute FCBA, France.

The project acknowledges the large and valuable variety of local conditions and promotes a better sensitivity to technological diversity. Lectures and a glossary with facts and methods together with a platform will be the knowledge base, where the most typical technological sub-processes for wood harvesting will be presented and assessed. Ultimately, the content will be available to the students as an e-learning course and will be recognized by forest faculties in Europe and integrated with 10 ECTS in the forest master curriculum.

Another important goal of the journal was to raise the impact factor to the level above 1.500. Today in 2022, the impact factor is 2.088 and rising, which ranks CROJFE as a 27/67 in a quartile Q2 on the Web of Science list of forestry journals. Not bad for a »small« European journal which was first published in 2006.

The core editorial board of the journal is still mostly made of employees of the Department of Forest Engineering of the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, University of Zagreb, only with small changes:

Þ Editors-in-Chief: Tibor Pentek, Tomislav Poršinsky

Þ Editor: Ivica Papa

Þ Technical Editor: Mario Šporčić

Þ Editorial Advisors: Dubravko Horvat, Željko Tomašić

Þ Technical Editorial Board: Matija Bakarić, Andreja Đuka, Zdravko Pandur, Dinko Vusić

Plans and goals of the journal can be summarized as follows:

Þ Develop and accept long-term (ten-year) journal development strategy;

Þ Sign a new cooperation agreement between the journal CROJFE and international FORMEC network;

Þ Include the journal CROJFE in the Current Contents bibliography database;

Þ Raise the impact factor and enter the position in the first quartile (Q1) on the Web of Science list of forestry journals;

Þ Make uniform the reviewing of papers and limit the reviewing time;

Þ Upgrade the automatic computer system for nominating and implementing the reviewing procedure of the papers;

Þ Achieve financial stability of the journal as the guarantee of its viability and independence by attracting a higher number of active co-publishers, donators and sponsors;

Þ Extend the list of reviewers with most qualified scientists dealing with forest engineering and interested in reviewing.

Finally, a great thank you goes to all of our publishers and co-publisher, to all members of the journal bodies: Publishing Council, Editorial Board and International Editorial Board, all authors and co-authors, all reviewers without whom the quality of the published papers would not be the same, and also thanks to donators, sponsors and supporters, thanks to all present and future readers.

Andreja Đuka, Tibor Pentek, Tomislav Poršinsky, Ivica Papa