TheJournalofVegetationScience afteritsSilverJubileeThe Journal of Vegetation Science has now completed 25 yrsince the publication of the first volume in 1990 (P€artelet al.2014).Weareproudoftheachievementsofthejour-nal since its inception as the main international referencefor vegetation scientists reporting advances in plant com-munity ecology. We thank our authors, referees and edi-torsfortheircontinuingeffort.Theyear2014 wasparticularlysuccessfulforthe Journalof Vegetation Science. The journal has had an increasingimpact on the scientific community, which also meant anincreasedamountofworkfor oureditorsandreferees.Thetotal number of submitted papers was nearly 500, but theworkflow is now efficient and almost all papers are man-agedwithinareasonablyshorttime.ThankstofinancialsupportfromtheInternationalAsso-ciation for Vegetation Science(IAVS),a totalof1512 pageswere published in the Journal of Vegetation Science in 2014,well above our standard of 1200 pages. This allowed us tocut the queue of accepted papersandpublish a total of144papers.This year the Journal ofVegetation Sciencewillreturntoitsstandardpagenumber.Our recent innovation of publishing short commentar-iestoprovideadditionalideasorbroadercontexttospecificinterestingpaperspublishedinthejournalwillcontinuein2015. Nine research papers on different topics wereaddressed in commentaries in 2014. In addition to thesecommentary papers, we also published a Guest Editorialby a really distinguished vegetation scientist at a veryspecial period of his life: David W. Goodall on the occasionof his 100th birthday! The work done by David hasbeen fundamental for vegetation science, including hispioneering studies on randomized sampling protocols andstatistical ecology. He also introduced the now commonterm ‘ordination’. In his Editorial, David reflected on somefundamental steps from past vegetation science and alsoforesaw some future research needs, concluding that“coming generations in our science will certainly not beshortofproblemstoface!”(Goodall2014).In 2014 the Journal of Vegetation Science maintained andstrengthened its leading role in the field of plant commu-nity ecology. The number of citations of journal articlesincreased significantly, and this is well reflected in the lat-est Thomson-Reuters Impact Factor of 3.372. This is notonly the highest impact factor in the history of the JournalofVegetationScience,butitisalso itsfirstimpactfactorabove(well above) the threshold of three. With this increase, theimpact factor of the journal is now in the first quartile inthe Ecology category, as it was already for Plant Sciencesand Forestry. We are proud of this, and we want towork even harder to maintain and improve the journal’svisibility.Editors’Awardfor2014As every year, the Chief Editors of the Journal of VegetationScience makean award toa paper published inthe previousyear. As always, the decision was not easy, and there weremany papers on the candidate list. In the end, we decidedto give the Editors’ Award for 2014 to Alexander Correa-Metrio for the paper ‘Environmental determinism andneutrality in vegetation at millennial time scales’ (Correa-Metrio et al. 2014), a very elegant approach testing nicheand neutrality mechanisms in community assembly at amillennial scale. By using a pollen record spanning over86 000 yr,theystudiedtherelativecontributionofneutralprocesses and environmental determinism to the vegeta-tion pattern in the Central American lowlands. They con-cluded that neutral processes have certainly been relevantin assembling plant communities, but climate was themajor driver of vegetation dynamics during the late