Aims & Scope

Aims

The Journal of Autonomous Forestry and Farming (JAFF) is an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the advancement of automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence in the management of agricultural and forest ecosystems. As the global demand for food and timber resources rises amidst labor shortages and climate variability, JAFF aims to bridge the gap between biological sciences (agronomy, silviculture, ecology) and engineering disciplines (robotics, computer vision, mechatronics).Our mission is to publish high-impact research that accelerates the transition from mechanized operations to fully autonomous, data-driven decision-making systems. We seek contributions that demonstrate how autonomous technologies can increase efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and enhance the resilience of land production systems.

Scope

The scope of the Journal includes, but is not limited to:

• Robotics and Unmanned Systems in Forestry and Farming
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): Design, control, and swarm intelligence for crop spraying, seeding, and forest inventory
• Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs): Autonomous tractors, robotic harvesters, and forestry forwarders
• Soft Robotics & Manipulation: End-effectors for delicate fruit picking or tree planting
• Navigation & Path Planning: SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) in unstructured environments (e.g., dense forests, muddy fields)
• Computer Vision: Weed detection, disease diagnosis, timber quality assessment, and species classification using Deep Learning
• Sensor Fusion: Integration of LiDAR, hyperspectral, thermal, and RGB data for real-time situational awareness
• Edge Computing: On-board processing for real-time decision-making without cloud reliance
• Automated forest inventory and carbon stock estimation
• Early wildfire detection and autonomous suppression technologies
• Digital Twins of forest ecosystems for predictive management
• Variable Rate Technology (VRT) for autonomous fertilization and irrigation
• Automated phenotyping and yield estimation
• Livestock monitoring and autonomous grazing systems
• Weed management using laser weeding or micro-dosing robots
• Human-in-the-loop systems: Safety protocols and collaborative robots (Cobots)
• IoT & Connectivity: 5G/6G applications in remote rural environments
• Economic & Ethical Analysis: Cost-benefit analysis of autonomous adoption, regulatory frameworks, and data privacy in land management

Publication Frequency

Quarterly

Ownership

The journal is owned by Institute of Central Computation and Knowledge Inc.

Author Fees

For information regarding publication fees and waiver policies, please refer to Article Processing Charge (APC). 

Archiving

All journals published by ICCK are archived in Portico, which provides permanent digital archiving for scholarly journals.

Copyright & Licensing

Articles published in JAFF will be Open-Access articles distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY). Under this license, author(s) retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, distribute, and/or copy articles published in JAFF, so long as the original author(s) and source are cited.

Access Policy

All articles published in this journal are freely available to readers worldwide immediately upon publication. There are no subscription charges or pay-per-view fees. Readers may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.

Editorial Board

The Journal is guided by an Editorial Board consisting of recognized experts in the field. For the complete list of Editorial Board members, please refer to Editorial Board.

Peer Review

The journal adheres to rigorous peer review and undergoes single-blind peer review. For more details, please refer to Editorial Process and Peer Review Policy.

Editorial Process

All manuscripts submitted to JAFF should adhere to the journal's Editorial Process.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism detection is performed at ICCK using the iThenticate- Crossref Similarity Checking tool. This web-based tool is employed in the editorial process to identify potential text plagiarism. It's important to note that while iThenticate can identify matching text, it cannot independently determine whether plagiarism has occurred. Manual examination of the matching text is still necessary, and judgment must be exercised to ascertain the presence or absence of plagiarism. The similarity report might be sent to the author for revision whenever needed.

Publication Ethics Statement

ICCK is responsible for implementing rigorous peer review and strict ethical policies and standards to ensure that high quality scientific work is added to the field of scholarly publishing. ICCK takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously, and our editors are trained to enforce COPE's Core Practices and Guidelines, with a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism, data falsification, and other behaviours. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate/Crossref Similarity Check to check submissions against previous publications.

Advertising

The journal does not accept any commercial product advertisements until policy changes otherwise.

Direct Marketing

Journal propagation has been done through the journal website and distribution of an introduction pamphlet. Invitations to submit a manuscript are usually targeted towards presenters at conferences, seminars, or workshops related to the journal's aims and scope.

Contact

Please visit Editorial Office for details about different queries.