The Journal of Biogeography (JBI) is committed to developing new opportunities that complement and extend biogeography's reach and impact, in addition to publishing the broadest and best existing biogeographic research. Thus, we are delighted to introduce a new Virtual Issue that does all these things, collating papers submitted in response to the announcement of the JBI Innovation Awards, a venue for manuscripts first-authored by early career researchers that encourages new ideas and perspectives in the discipline. The virtual issue begins with the inaugural (Carvalho et al., 2023; Vasconcelos et al., 2023; Windsor et al., 2023) and most recent (Korábek et al., 2022; Schrader et al., 2023) papers and will continue to grow each year. The manuscripts were considered using JBI's standard editorial and peer review processes and were additionally ranked in terms of the originality of their ideas, identification of a gap in knowledge, and impact of findings. The collection illustrates the creativity and vigour of biogeographical research. We congratulate Ondřej Korábek and Julian Schrader as the recipients of the most recent JBI Innovation Awards and their co-authors for sharing in this success. Korábek and colleagues' paper, ‘In both directions: Expansions of European land snails to the north and south from glacial refugia’, presents a fascinating picture of dispersal by classically slow-moving creatures across Central Europe since the Last Glacial Maximum. Using genetic data and radiocarbon dating of fossils, they reconstruct a complex tale of postglacial movements, finding that some species have moved more than others, recolonization has happened more or less in all directions, and some snails made surprisingly rapid leaps (likely associated with translocation by humans or other animals). Their detailed data add substance to postglacial biogeographic theory (Pielou, 1991) while also highlighting hidden assumptions—as might be implicit in, for example, the idiom ‘a snail's pace’—and so cautioning against underestimating the limits of reconstructing movements in other taxa and across other spatial and temporal scales for which data are less plentiful. Putting a timescale on dispersal events further emphasizes the relevance of their work to understanding the dynamics of movements of slow-moving taxa such as snails in other parts of the world, with richer endemic faunas and critical conservation implications (Perera et al., 2021). Such studies can fill gaps in our understanding of dispersal in general, building bridges between theoretical biogeography and invasion science which is of critical importance in the face of climate change. Schrader and colleagues likewise advance long-standing theory in their paper ‘ETIB-T: An Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography for plant traits’. They build on the foundational Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography (ETIB; MacArthur & Wilson, 1963, 1967), which inspired countless island studies. However, the core theory and subsequent papers have focussed largely on species richness, downplaying other aspects of diversity. Schrader et al. (2023) extend the ETIB's core principles to assess the processes affecting plant functional traits over time. Using plant distribution and trait data from islands of varying size in Western Australia, the authors tested whether individual traits, and functional diversity as a whole (FD), remained at equilibrium through time, similar to the equilibrium species richness predicted by the ETIB. They found that while there was turnover in species on the islands, locally extinct species tended to be replaced by new species possessing similar traits. As such, Schrader and colleagues indicate that several core concepts of the ETIB can be extended to functional traits and FD, opening up many novel areas for future island research, including the applicability of the extended theory to other taxa. The consequential science in both papers is accentuated by easy-to-read text and attractive informative figures that engage the reader and emphasize the logical flow of the narrative. Both papers also bring multiple perspectives (data types, places, species, and traits), thus illustrating how ‘comparative biogeography’—an approach that is key for JBI articles—can improve the power of inferring effects and our confidence in inferences. Coincidentally, these papers also presage two upcoming special issues of the journal, one on the Biogeography of the Carpathians and the other on Functional Island Biogeography. This suggests these are indeed two areas of growing interest. The Carpathian Mountains are an emerging model region where overlaying diverse biogeographic studies is yielding an integrated understanding of how intersections among processes and scales can shape biogeographic patterns. Likewise, functional biogeography is finally coming of age as it shifts from generic descriptions of FD to consideration of the effects of specific traits; and nowhere is there a richer theatre than in an update of the quintessentially neutral Equilibrium Theory of Biogeography, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year (MacArthur & Wilson, 1963). By bringing these two burgeoning areas of research to the fore—and highlighting areas of overlap and synergy—the awards papers and forthcoming special issues will advance biogeographic concepts and theory globally. All authors wrote and edited the manuscript. We thank JBI's chief editors and the team at Wiley for establishing and managing the JBI Innovation Awards. The authors have no conflicts of interest. No data were involved in this publication. The authors are associate and chief editors at the Journal of Biogeography, including a prior member of the early career Editorial Academy.