Journal of Vegetation Science in 2015: journal growth, celebrations and awards

Abstract

The Journal of Vegetation Science has now completed 25 yr since the publication of the first volume in 1990 (Pärtel et al. 2014). We are proud of the achievements of the journal since its inception as the main international reference for vegetation scientists reporting advances in plant community ecology. We thank our authors, referees and editors for their continuing effort. The year 2014 was particularly successful for the Journal of Vegetation Science. The journal has had an increasing impact on the scientific community, which also meant an increased amount of work for our editors and referees. The total number of submitted papers was nearly 500, but the workflow is now efficient and almost all papers are managed within a reasonably short time. Thanks to financial support from the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS), a total of 1512 pages were published in the Journal of Vegetation Science in 2014, well above our standard of 1200 pages. This allowed us to cut the queue of accepted papers and publish a total of 144 papers. This year the Journal of Vegetation Science will return to its standard page number. Our recent innovation of publishing short commentaries to provide additional ideas or broader context to specific interesting papers published in the journal will continue in 2015. Nine research papers on different topics were addressed in commentaries in 2014. In addition to these commentary papers, we also published a Guest Editorial by a really distinguished vegetation scientist at a very special period of his life: David W. Goodall on the occasion of his 100th birthday! The work done by David has been fundamental for vegetation science, including his pioneering studies on randomized sampling protocols and statistical ecology. He also introduced the now common term ‘ordination’. In his Editorial, David reflected on some fundamental steps from past vegetation science and also foresaw some future research needs, concluding that “coming generations in our science will certainly not be short of problems to face!” (Goodall 2014). In 2014 the Journal of Vegetation Science maintained and strengthened its leading role in the field of plant community ecology. The number of citations of journal articles increased significantly, and this is well reflected in the latest Thomson-Reuters Impact Factor of 3.372. This is not only the highest impact factor in the history of the Journal of Vegetation Science, but it is also its first impact factor above ‒(well above) ‒the threshold of three. With this increase, the impact factor of the journal is now in the first quartile in the Ecology category, as it was already for Plant Sciences and Forestry. We are proud of this, and we want to work even harder to maintain and improve the journal's visibility. As every year, the Chief Editors of the Journal of Vegetation Science make an award to a paper published in the previous year. As always, the decision was not easy, and there were many papers on the candidate list. In the end, we decided to give the Editors’ Award for 2014 to Alexander Correa-Metrio for the paper ‘Environmental determinism and neutrality in vegetation at millennial time scales’ (Correa-Metrio et al. 2014), a very elegant approach testing niche and neutrality mechanisms in community assembly at a millennial scale. By using a pollen record spanning over 86 000 yr, they studied the relative contribution of neutral processes and environmental determinism to the vegetation pattern in the Central American lowlands. They concluded that neutral processes have certainly been relevant in assembling plant communities, but climate was the major driver of vegetation dynamics during the late Pleistocene. We awarded this paper also to highlight the importance of historical factors in shaping present-day vegetation, a fact that is often neglected in favour of present and more easily measurable factors. There were several other excellent papers and, among these, the runner up was a paper on the consistency of trait-based species rankings across data sets and spatial scales from Kazakou et al. (2014). They combined field observations and data extracted from databases and, despite detecting some differences in intraspecific trait variability, they observed that for most traits, interspecific variability was higher than intraspecific variability. Since species ranking was maintained across data sets and spatial scales, they concluded that the strength of the species signal is strong enough to allow the use of experimental and archive data to characterize local populations of species. Given the importance of traits in present-day plant community ecology, this result is certainly highly relevant. Another very interesting paper focusing on plant traits was the contribution of Moles et al. (2014), coming from the Special Feature assembled based on the keynote talks at the 56th IAVS Symposium in Tartu, Estonia (2013). They investigated if plant traits are more closely correlated with mean annual temperature or annual precipitation, which is a simple but fundamental question for understanding plant community assembly. By using a meta-analysis involving 21 plant traits from 447 961 species–site combinations worldwide, Moles and colleagues found that mean annual temperature was a better predictor of plant traits than annual precipitation. This supported some of the assumptions of the classical ecological theory about vegetation distribution, but also pointed out interesting directions for future research. We also mention Lezama et al. (2014, as commented on by Overbeck 2014). Their experimental results demonstrated that species richness is decreased by grazing in low-productive steppes while it is increased by grazing in high-productive grasslands. One of the most influential persons in the success of the Journal of Vegetation Science is certainly John Bastow Wilson, simply Bastow for us and for most vegetation scientists at the IAVS meetings. In 2013, Bastow retired from his job at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and also from his position as Chair of the Editors of the Journal of Vegetation Science and Applied Vegetation Science. We acknowledged the work of Bastow for the journals by compiling a Virtual Special Feature in his honour. This Virtual Special Feature contains a collection of 14 papers published in both the Journal of Vegetation Science and Applied Vegetation Science, focusing on topics of plant community assembly (see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1654-1103). Among these, influential papers from Bastow were included, which ranged across a wide spectrum of subjects, from the nature of limiting similarity in community assembly (Wilson 2007) to synthesis about the different theories explaining co-existence in plant communities (Wilson 2011a), to methodological contributions on measuring plant cover to characterize community structure (Wilson 2011b) and to the relative value of species presence/absence vs abundance values to describe patterns in plant communities (Wilson 2012). We hope that this Virtual Special Feature will serve as a useful reference and will stimulate vegetation scientists to further advance research on plant community assembly. Plant community ecology has different facets and different approaches. The Journal of Vegetation Science aims to serve all vegetation scientists or, using a definition adopted by Laco Mucina for the 57th IAVS Symposium in Perth in 2014, it aims to represent the United Colours of Vegetation Science. And we hope to see even more colours at the next IAVS Symposium, which will be held in Brno, Czech Republic, on 19–24 July 2015.