Towards more reproducibility in vegetation research

The Editors' Award for the year 2023 goes to Gabriel Massaine Moulatlet for the article “Global patterns of phylogenetic beta-diversity components in angiosperms” (Moulatlet et al., 2023). This article does not deal with plant communities in the strict sense but provides a macroecological analysis of a large number of plant species, a topic that is also within the scope of the Journal of Vegetation Science, as shown in the recent Special Issue Macroecology of Vegetation (Pärtel et al., 2022). Moulatlet and co-authors compiled distribution range maps for 207,146 species of angiosperms and conducted the first global assessment of phylogenetic beta-diversity (PBD) patterns for this group. They decomposed PBD into turnover and nestedness components and found that in most areas, lineage replacement was more important than lineage loss. However, the importance of lineage loss (nestedness) increased at higher latitudes, at higher elevations and on islands and peninsulas. They also compared taxonomic beta-diversity with PBD and showed that species exchanges were more important overall than lineage exchanges and that the importance of species exchanges relative to lineage exchanges even increased toward higher latitudes and low-temperature areas. This study demonstrates that global PBD patterns in angiosperms are related to geographic and environmental gradients and reflect evolutionary and biogeographic history.

Other notable articles considered as Award candidates by the Chief Editors or Associate Editors were Delalandre et al. (2023) and Alessi et al. (2023). Léo Delalandre and his co-authors compared the change in plant traits in response to management intensification between two groups of plants with different life histories: annuals and perennials occurring in the same plant community of Mediterranean rangeland. They found that each of these groups responded differently to the management intensification gradient for some plant traits. These results suggest that plant groups with different life histories should not be blindly grouped in studies of trait–environment relationships; otherwise, we might neglect important information about differential responses in different components of a plant community.

Nicola Alessi and colleagues addressed a recurring methodological issue in vegetation science: the effects of probabilistic vs preferential sampling on analytical results. They compared two large data sets of forest vegetation plots sampled across Italy, one probabilistically and the other preferentially. They found that the analyses of the probabilistic data set were better in estimating species richness and diversity of plant communities, whereas the preferential approach was better suited to detect forest-specialist species and hotspots of plant diversity. The authors conclude that both approaches should be combined to achieve the best results.

New Associate Editors have joined the Journal of Vegetation Science in 2023: Arshad Ali (CN), Eric Lamb (CA), Luis Daniel Llambí (VE), Josep Padullés Cubino (ES), Sergey Rosbakh (DK), Julian Schrader (AU), Guilherme Seger (BR), Ole R. Vetaas (NO), Amanda Taylor (DE), Kerstin Wiegand (DE) and Sa Xiao (CN). We welcome these colleagues and thank the outgoing Associate Editors, Sándor Bartha (HU) and Alessandra Fidelis (BR), for their valuable contributions to the journal. We also express gratitude to the referees who dedicated their time to the journal in the past year (Appendix A).

Section 1 was prepared by the members of the Steering Committee of the IAVS Ecoinformatics Working Group (MGS, MBa, GML, SS and RAFdL) and MBo, who considered the comments of the JVS Chief Editors (VP, JP, VW and MC). The text of this section represents the opinion of the JVS Chief Editors. Sections 2 and 3 were written by the JVS Chief Editors.