Forests in Southeast Asia are a valuable natural resource of great variety playing a significant socio-economic role for the countries in the region. Its tropical rainforests are among the most complex and species-rich terrestrial ecosystems in the world. Widespread deforestation over the past decades, however, caused by many multifaceted factors such as increase in human population, poverty, and rapid industrialization has lead to significant changes in land use cover resulting in environmentally, economically, and aesthetically vulnerable landscapes. To some degree the effects of deforestation have been compensated through natural forest regeneration and plantation establishments. Being acquainted with the past and ongoing rehabilitation initiatives in the region and comparing the achievements to date with the magnitude of the area in need of rehabilitation, it can easily be seen that a lot more efforts and investments are required to establish sufficient tree cover in the region. Hence, there is an urgent need to improve the quality of forest restoration and rehabilitation and to find effective ways to undertake these activities in the context of explicable environmental, social, and economic needs and interests. The advent of a book series titled "Keep Asia Green" through the initiative of the ASEAN-Korea Environmental Cooperation Project (AKECOP) in cooperation with the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (lUFRO) through the Special Programme for the Developing Countries (lUFRO-SPDC) indicates a concerted effort to work towards rehabilitating the region's devastated forests. I feel so inspired with this effort and I am so honored to be part of this undertaking as this will be a great contribution to the Southeast Asia region. The book series "Keep Asia Green" aims to understand the national capacities in terms of forest rehabilitation and existing education programs and to analyze the need for further strengthening of forest landscape restoration efforts in each country as well as each region in Asia. The first volume of the book provides state-of-the-art information about the forests of eight countries in the Southeast Asian region, namely Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It includes historical perspectives of land use change in Southeast Asia, present state of forest degradation, and response to the forest rehabilitation needs including major lessons learned from the country's case studies. The lessons learned from the many reforestation and rehabilitation projects allow the formulation of recommendations for future actions. These actions aim at further enhancing the approaches to forest rehabilitation so that investments into trees and forests achieve an even greater impact on the landscape, thus providing enhanced environmental services and economic benefits for human well being of present and future generations. This book is the first of its kind in Southeast Asia providing an important contribution towards the objectives of forest landscape restoration and an essential reading material for practitioners and decision makers involved in forest restoration.
