New Open-Access Journal PLOS Ecosystems Aims to Unite Science Against the Biodiversity Crisis

The world’s ecosystems are being transformed at a pace unmatched in human history, and biodiversity is disappearing faster than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Yet according to the launch editorial of a bold new scientific journal, the research community has lacked a single venue where ecologists, climate scientists, social scientists, and policymakers can come together to confront the crisis as one interconnected problem. That gap is what PLOS Ecosystems, an interdisciplinary, open-access journal for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences, has been created to fill.

Henrique Miguel Pereira, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, who is based at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and BIOPOLIS-CIBIO at the University of Porto, argues that humanity is not only losing the result of millions of years of evolution but also missing critical opportunities to tackle entangled societal and environmental challenges. These include climate change, the development of sustainable and fair agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and the effort to make cities more livable and healthy. Although a growing number of journals address sectoral slices of these issues, he writes, a truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary journal in ecosystems and biodiversity has been missing from the scientific landscape.

The technical ambition behind the new journal is striking. Rather than organizing content around traditional disciplinary boundaries such as botany, zoology, or oceanography, the editorial team structured the journal’s sections around the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, known as IPBES. That framework, developed through a global scientific and policy consensus process, maps how direct and indirect drivers of change cascade through ecosystems to affect nature, nature’s contributions to people, and human well-being. By aligning journal sections with this architecture, PLOS Ecosystems is effectively building its editorial identity on the same conceptual scaffolding that underpins international biodiversity assessment and policy.

Four of the journal’s sections are dedicated to the major drivers of ecosystem change: Ecosystems and Land-use/Sea-use, Ecosystems and Climate, Ecosystems and Pollution, and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity. Pereira notes that the naming of the fourth section is deliberate, emphasizing the journal’s focus on finding solutions for the biodiversity crisis and its connection to the themes of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the international treaty that guides global conservation commitments. Two further sections address the understanding, conservation, restoration, and management of ecosystems themselves, one covering terrestrial systems and another covering freshwater and marine environments. A seventh section is devoted to Ecosystem Functions and Benefits, encompassing what scientists variously call ecosystem services or nature’s contributions to people, and an eighth examines Social-Ecological Interactions, exploring how people manage and affect ecosystems and how they perceive and experience biodiversity and its benefits.

The editorial leadership reflects the journal’s global scope. Pereira describes an interdisciplinary team of scientists leading the sections who come from all six inhabited continents, supported by a team of experienced Academic Editors providing detailed expertise across the broad journal scope. Recruitment is ongoing, and the launch editorial doubles as an open invitation for additional researchers to apply to join the editorial board, with the stated goal of building a diverse and representative body of editors. This geographic breadth matters for a field in which the majority of the planet’s biodiversity lies in the Global South while much of the publishing power has historically been concentrated in wealthy nations.

The first issue of the journal showcases the disciplinary and transdisciplinary breadth the editors are aiming for. It includes an Opinion paper by Anne Larigauderie, who served as executive secretary of IPBES for more than a decade, from the platform’s inception until recently. In her piece, titled ‘What science does biodiversity action still need? Lessons from a decade of IPBES,’ she examines the major research gaps at the science-policy interface, with particular attention to the knowledge needed to address what policymakers call the implementation gap, the persistent distance between international biodiversity commitments and their delivery on the ground. The debut issue also features a range of other Opinion and Research Articles spanning topics from wildlife disease surveillance to the modelling of invasion risk and the impacts of herbicide use in urban areas in Ghana, a spread that illustrates how ecological research increasingly intersects with public health, trade, agriculture, and urban planning.

Underlying the editorial vision is a pointed critique of how biodiversity science has been published and shared. Pereira emphasizes that open science is particularly important for biodiversity and ecosystem research because most of the world’s biodiversity is located in low-income countries, yet historically many of the studies describing it appeared in journals that researchers from those countries could not access. Beyond paywalls, the underlying biodiversity data and the analysis code were frequently unavailable, making it difficult for local scientists and managers to verify, reuse, or build upon published findings. This situation, he notes, has begun to change in recent years with the rise of open science journals and platforms for sharing biodiversity data, but the costs of publishing in the field’s most prestigious outlets often remain prohibitive for many scientists.

PLOS Ecosystems has been established to allow all researchers, with the editorial stressing the word ‘all,’ to publish their work in a broad-impact journal. PLOS is working to make open access funding more equitable and sustainable, an effort the editorial links directly to the journal’s mission. In addition, the journal’s commitment to making data and code public goes beyond other initiatives in the field, according to Pereira, with the aim of making science truly accessible and empowering ecosystem and biodiversity managers around the world. For practitioners working in national parks, fisheries agencies, or municipal planning departments, the practical significance is clear: studies published in the journal can be read, scrutinized, and applied without subscription barriers, and the evidence behind them can be independently examined.

The journal arrives at a moment when the science-policy machinery around biodiversity is accelerating. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has set nations ambitious targets for protecting and restoring ecosystems, and mechanisms such as IPBES exist to ensure those commitments rest on the best available evidence. Yet the launch editorial makes the case that the knowledge system feeding this machinery remains fragmented, with climate scientists, conservation biologists, agricultural researchers, and social scientists often publishing past one another in specialized venues. A journal explicitly designed around the IPBES framework, and around the interface between science, policy, and society, represents an attempt to rewire that plumbing at the level of scientific publishing itself.

Whether PLOS Ecosystems can become the forum its founders envision, a place where scientists working across a wide range of fields interact with a broad readership that extends beyond academia to practitioners and decision-makers, will depend on the research community it hopes to attract. But the premise of the launch is unambiguous: the biodiversity crisis is not a problem any single discipline can solve, and the systems for communicating science about it should not be siloed either. As the editorial concludes, the loss of biodiversity means losing millions of years of evolutionary history, and with it the chance to build sustainable agriculture, fair fisheries, climate resilience, and healthier cities. The first issue of PLOS Ecosystems is now online, open to everyone, as a first step toward changing how that story is told.

Subject of Research: Launch of the interdisciplinary open-access journal PLOS Ecosystems for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences

Article Title: PLOS Ecosystems : An interdisciplinary journal for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences

Article References: Pereira, H. M. (2026). PLOS Ecosystems: An interdisciplinary journal for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences. PLOS Ecosystems, 1(1), e0000031. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pesy.0000031

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pesy.0000031

Keywords: PLOS Ecosystems, biodiversity, ecosystems, open access, IPBES, conservation, science policy, ecosystem services, social-ecological systems, Convention on Biological Diversity, open science, Henrique Miguel Pereira