The journal’s founding Editor-in-Chief is Henrique M. Pereira, Professor of Biodiversity Conservation at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), who also leads the General Zoology department at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and serves as an Invited Professor at BIOPOLIS/InBio, Universidade do Porto. In an Editorial accompanying the first issue, Pereira explains that the journal is organized into sections dedicated to key topics of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), including pollution, climate, biodiversity, terrestrial and freshwater or marine ecosystems, social-ecological interactions, and nature contributions to people. Each section is overseen by a diverse group of academic editors drawn from across all six inhabited continents, a structure designed to ensure that editorial judgment reflects the geographic breadth of the field.

In interviews accompanying the launch, Pereira argued that the scientific publishing landscape has not kept pace with the complexity of environmental challenges. There are already many journals in the field broadly, he noted, but they are too specialized, covering only parts of the challenges in ecosystem research, or they are too expensive for scientists to publish in. What motivated him to join PLOS, he said, is the need for a truly transdisciplinary journal that integrates all scientists working to address ecosystem change, biodiversity loss, and associated environmental problems. He framed the central scientific challenge as pinpointing which parts of this complexity can yield solutions for policies and management approaches that practitioners can use to lead nature and people toward a positive path.

Pereira’s stated vision for the journal extends beyond publishing the best research in ecosystem and biodiversity science. He emphasized publishing research that is societally relevant and read by practitioners and decision-makers around the world, with the explicit aim of accelerating the speed at which research in this field is taken up. This orientation toward the science-policy interface is reflected throughout the first issue, which opens with an Opinion piece by Anne Larigauderie, former Executive Secretary of IPBES, titled “What science does biodiversity action still need? Lessons from a decade of IPBES.” The piece assesses the state of biodiversity research after ten years of the intergovernmental platform and considers the role the new journal can play in closing persistent gaps between evidence generation and biodiversity action.

Among the research articles in the debut issue is a data-focused study with unusually practical implications for the entire field: “Ambiguous data licences undermine global ecosystem mapping efforts.” The authors examined the Global Ecosystems Atlas Data Catalogue and found that one-third of its 343 datasets lack license information entirely, fewer than half are shared under Creative Commons licenses, and one in five carry custom data licenses that are lengthy and difficult to interpret. Because large-scale ecosystem mapping depends on combining datasets from many sources, ambiguous licensing can stall or invalidate integration efforts. The authors recommend that ecosystems researchers include explicit data license information, use standard licensing where possible, and, where data must be restricted, provide clear information about how to legally obtain access.

The issue also introduces methodological advances with direct applications in conservation and biosecurity. “A protocol for biodiversity-informed wildlife disease surveillance” describes a framework that integrates data on host biodiversity with sampling priorities for wildlife disease surveillance, drawing on host species distribution models and pathogen prevalence data where available. The approach makes adaptive sampling recommendations possible for researchers in the field, allowing surveillance effort to be steered toward locations and species where disease emergence risk is expected to be highest. Such biodiversity-informed surveillance is increasingly relevant as land-use change and wildlife trade alter contact patterns between wild hosts, domestic animals, and humans.

Theoretical ecology is represented by “Self-organized vegetation patterns promote persistence of plant–pollinator mutualisms under environmental stress.” The study explores how spatial self-organization, the process by which vegetation arranges itself into characteristic patterns such as those seen in arid ecosystems, may stabilize mutualistic communities. By structuring plant populations spatially, these self-organized patterns can potentially drive the persistence of plant-pollinator interactions even in environments under significant stress, offering a mechanistic explanation for how some mutualisms survive conditions that simpler models would predict to be fatal.

Applied conservation biology appears in a study from Ghana examining “Urban herbicide use threatens a non-target butterfly (Hypolimnas misippus) through direct toxicity and host plant stress.” The research documents how the increasing use of urban herbicides threatens the native mimic butterfly Hypolimnas misippus through two pathways: direct toxic exposure to the butterflies themselves and indirect harm via stress to their host plants. The finding highlights how chemical management of urban vegetation can cascade through food webs to affect non-target species, a concern that intersects with the journal’s pollution section.

Microbial ecology receives attention in “Climate change and planetary microbiome: Are we overlooking free-living amoebae in climate-microbiome dynamics?” An international group of authors argues that free-living amoebae, single-celled organisms that are frequently overlooked in discussions of ecosystems and the global microbiome, deserve greater recognition for the roles they play in planetary processes. The piece is a call for the research community to incorporate these organisms into climate-microbiome frameworks rather than treating the microbial world as synonymous with bacteria alone.

Rounding out the first issue, “Combining branching processes and Allee effects into an integral projection model to assess invasion risk” presents a new modeling tool trialled on silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), an invasive species in the Upper Mississippi River system that is at risk of expanding into the Great Lakes. The model combines branching processes, which describe population growth and reproduction probabilistically, with Allee effects, the phenomenon by which population growth slows at low densities, within an integral projection model framework to assess invasion risk for potentially invasive species. Together, the seven papers and the Editorial sketch the journal’s intended scope: rigorous, technically grounded ecosystem science that is openly accessible and positioned to inform policy and management decisions worldwide. The Editorial and all articles in the first issue are freely available through PLOS Ecosystems.

Subject of Research: Launch of the open-access journal PLOS Ecosystems and the research in its first issue

Article Title: PLOS Ecosystems publishes its first issue

Article References: PLOS Ecosystems publishes its first issue. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: PLOS Ecosystems, biodiversity, ecosystems, open access, IPBES, science publishing, conservation, wildlife disease surveillance, invasive species, pollinators, climate change, data licensing

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

The evidence assembled by the team ranges from the charming to the downright bizarre. Consider the Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, whose shaggy coat hosts a miniature ecosystem. Sloth moths live out their lives in the animal’s fur, and their activities help cultivate algae that grow in the sloth’s hair — algae the sloth then eats, supplementing its otherwise meadow-sparse diet of leaves. In this sense, the sloth is not merely tolerating its insect tenants; it is actively farming them, or at least farming the garden they fertilize. Remove the moths, and the sloth loses both a nutrient source and a living camouflage that helps it vanish into the canopy.

Other examples reveal insects serving as tools, infrastructure, and even medicine. Chimpanzees have been observed applying insects to open wounds, a behavior that appears to help sterilize injuries and may represent a form of self-medication. Herons, meanwhile, have turned insects into fishing equipment, using them as bait to lure fish within striking distance. Birds and reptiles lay their eggs inside termite mounds, exploiting the structures’ remarkably stable internal temperatures as natural incubators. In arid environments, some desert frogs take refuge inside ant nests, where the humidity offers a buffer against desiccation in landscapes where water is the scarcest resource of all.

“Insects are sometimes called the ‘little things that run the world’ because they are so important to life on Earth,” said Grames, the paper’s co-lead author. “We often hear about their importance as pollinators, or decomposers, or food for insectivores like birds and bats, but we forget about all the other things they do for us and for other species.” That observation captures the review’s core ambition: to move beyond the well-worn categories of pollination and predation and catalog the full breadth of insect-vertebrate relationships, many of which fall through the cracks of conventional ecological research.

The project was a genuinely international undertaking, with authors drawn from eight countries. Alongside Grames, the review was co-led by Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and Chris Elphick, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. Additional Binghamton contributors included Lindsey Swierk, assistant professor of biological sciences, and biological sciences alumni Julianna Yager and Suyeon Jang. In a fitting touch, Jang — an undergraduate with a painting minor — created the paper’s main illustration as an independent study project, translating the review’s scientific breadth into a single visual statement.

The effort traces its origins to 2022, when researchers established the Status of Insects: An International Research Coordination Network, an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation. The network emerged directly from Grames’ doctoral work in Elphick’s laboratory, and it was designed to confront a persistent problem in entomology and ecology more broadly: the literature on insect-vertebrate interactions is scattered across hundreds of individual studies, each examining a narrow slice of the picture. By consolidating that dispersed evidence into a single synthesis, the review offers the most comprehensive account yet of how deeply vertebrate life is woven into the fabric of insect diversity.

The scale of that dependence is difficult to overstate. There are an estimated 14 to 30 million species of insects on Earth, and they underpin the health and function of ecosystems on nearly every continent. They feed species ranging from hummingbirds, whose metabolisms demand near-constant refueling, to grizzly bears, which gorge on moths and other insects during critical seasons. Insects also enable other food sources indirectly through pollination, and they produce substances — honeydew, honey, and wax among them — that are themselves consumed by other species. For many vertebrates, insect abundance is not a background condition but a calendar: a variety of species time their breeding seasons to coincide with seasonal pulses of insect availability, synchronizing reproduction with the brief windows when their young can be fed.

The review also documents subtler forms of dependence that border on engineering. Birds incorporate spider and insect silk into their nests, taking advantage of materials with tensile properties that few natural substances can match. Some birds go further, deliberately situating their nests near stinging insects such as wasps, recruiting the colony’s venomous defenses as a security system against predators. More than 200 bird species use crushed ants for grooming — a behavior known as anting, in which the birds rub ants over their plumage, likely benefiting from the insects’ chemical secretions. And the relationship between insects and nesting vertebrates stretches deep into the past: insects once lived inside dinosaur nests, cleaning them out, and according to Grames, they still perform that sanitation service today in the nests of some owls and kingfishers.

Yet for all this richness, the scientific literature has a conspicuous blind spot. Few studies consider how insect population declines affect vertebrate species beyond the most obvious channel — a shrinking food supply. That narrow framing, the authors argue, dramatically understates the risk. If insects disappear, vertebrates lose not only calories but nesting materials, incubators, medicines, sanitation services, climate refuges, and the ecological timing cues that structure their reproductive cycles. Some insect populations have experienced alarming declines in recent decades, and those losses will ultimately propagate through the vertebrate communities that depend on them in ways that current research has barely begun to measure.

The numbers behind that warning are stark. “We’re losing insects at a rate of about 1-2% per year,” Grames said. “When you scale that up across a few decades, we’re talking about a major change to ecosystems. Insect conservation should be a top priority for anyone worried about the future of biodiversity.” A decline of even one to two percent annually, compounded over half a century, translates into a transformation of insect communities on a scale that has no precedent in recent ecological memory. Elphick, an ornithologist by training, framed the implication as a call for scientific bridge-building: he hopes the review will foster increased collaboration between scientists who study vertebrates and those who study insects. “If you want to have vertebrates, then you’ve got to be thinking about insect conservation, and we don’t do that nearly enough,” he said. In an era when conservation planning is often organized around charismatic vertebrates and their habitats, the review’s synthesis delivers a pointed reminder that the fates of sloths, songbirds, chimpanzees, and frogs are entangled with creatures small enough to escape notice — and that protecting the little things that run the world may be the surest way to protect everything that runs on them.

Subject of Research: The diverse roles of insect biodiversity in supporting vertebrate species

Article Title: Insects are essential to vertebrate life — as food, shelter and medicine

Article References: Insects are essential to vertebrate life — as food, shelter and medicine. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: insects, vertebrates, biodiversity, conservation, sloths, entomology, ecology, insect decline, termite mounds, chimpanzees, Nature Reviews Biodiversity, ecosystems

The research, led by Jingru Zou of Henan University together with Fuqian Zhou and Jinrui Zhu, focused on Henan, a densely populated agricultural heartland that sits at the crossroads of China’s major farming zones. The team drew on satellite data from the MODIS instruments, which estimate both gross primary production, the total amount of carbon that vegetation fixes through photosynthesis, and evapotranspiration, the combined loss of water from soil evaporation and plant transpiration. Dividing one by the other yields water use efficiency, expressed here in grams of carbon fixed per kilogram of water consumed per year.

Across the study period from 2008 to 2016, the mean annual water use efficiency of the region came out at 1.99 grams of carbon per kilogram of water per year. Perhaps surprisingly, given how varied Henan’s landscapes are, from intensively cultivated croplands to woodlands and grasslands, the differences between vegetation types were not statistically significant. Whatever the plants were, crops or trees or grasses, they operated at broadly similar levels of carbon-per-water performance, suggesting that regional climate conditions exert a strong common influence across the province’s ecosystems.

The more striking finding was the trend over time. Water use efficiency rose significantly during the nine-year window, at a rate of 0.13 grams of carbon per kilogram per year, and the increase was consistent across all the vegetation types examined. In other words, the entire regional mosaic of ecosystems was drifting in the same direction, becoming more productive relative to its water consumption. Because Henan is a major grain-producing province where water resources are already under pressure from irrigation demands and groundwater depletion, an improvement in natural water use efficiency carries real practical significance for regional water planning.

To understand what was driving the change, the researchers turned to pathway analysis, a statistical technique that traces how individual environmental variables influence water use efficiency both directly and indirectly through its two components, gross primary production and evapotranspiration. Their analysis showed that changes in water use efficiency in the region are jointly controlled by both terms of the ratio: shifts in carbon uptake and shifts in water loss each contribute to the overall pattern. That dual control matters, because it means any driver that affects photosynthesis or transpiration can ripple through to the efficiency metric.

When the individual drivers were separated, two emerged as statistically significant. Precipitation had a significant negative effect on water use efficiency, a result that may seem counterintuitive at first but follows from the structure of the ratio. When more rain falls, soils stay wetter and evapotranspiration tends to increase, often outpacing any corresponding gain in carbon uptake, so the carbon-to-water ratio declines. Conversely, in drier conditions plants tend to conserve water by closing their stomata, and the efficiency metric can rise. The finding aligns with a broader body of work showing that water availability shapes ecosystem efficiency in complex, sometimes opposing ways depending on the timescale and the aridity of the environment.

The second significant driver was atmospheric carbon dioxide, which had a clear positive effect on water use efficiency. This reflects one of the best-documented physiological responses in plant science: as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air rises, plants can achieve the same carbon gain with less water loss, because the gradient driving carbon into the leaf strengthens while the stomata can partially narrow. This so-called carbon dioxide fertilization effect has been observed in forests across the northern hemisphere and in global satellite-based analyses, and the Henan study confirms that it is operating measurably at the ecosystem scale in central China.

Just as revealing were the factors that did not register as significant. Temperature, vapor pressure deficit, solar radiation, and the leaf area index all failed to show a statistically significant effect on water use efficiency in this region during the study period. Vapor pressure deficit, the difference between how much moisture the air holds and how much it could hold, is widely recognized as a powerful driver of transpiration, and recent global work has shown that rising atmospheric dryness can suppress vegetation growth and reduce efficiency. That it did not emerge as a dominant factor here suggests that, over this particular window and in this particular climate, the carbon dioxide signal and the precipitation signal outweighed the influence of atmospheric dryness and energy availability.

Synthesizing these results, the authors conclude that the observed increase in water use efficiency in central China arises from a combination of precipitation and carbon dioxide effects, with the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide playing the leading role. The study adds a valuable regional data point to a growing global picture in which terrestrial ecosystems, buoyed by carbon dioxide fertilization, are fixing more carbon per unit of water than they did decades ago. Whether this trend can continue is an open question, since the fertilization effect is expected to saturate over time while warming continues to increase the atmosphere’s demand for water.

For Henan Province, the findings carry a note of cautious optimism. A region that must feed a large population while managing strained water resources is, at least for now, seeing its ecosystems quietly become more water-frugal. The study also demonstrates the power of pairing freely available satellite products with pathway analysis to disentangle the competing influences of climate and rising carbon dioxide, an approach that can be extended to other regions where the balance between carbon gain and water loss will shape how ecosystems weather the decades ahead.

Subject of Research: Spatiotemporal variability and drivers of ecosystem water use efficiency in central China

Article Title: Spatiotemporal variability in ecosystem water use efficiency and its driving factors during 2008–2016 in central China

Article References: Zou, J., Zhou, F., & Zhu, J. (2026). Spatiotemporal variability in ecosystem water use efficiency and its driving factors during 2008–2016 in central China. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 157(10), Article 686. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-026-06625-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00704-026-06625-w

Keywords: water use efficiency, gross primary production, evapotranspiration, carbon dioxide fertilization, MODIS, Henan Province, precipitation, vapor pressure deficit, remote sensing, climate change, ecosystems, China

The stated mission of Discover Ecology is threefold: to advance the understanding of ecological systems, to foster interdisciplinary research, and to promote solutions that address the complex challenges facing ecosystems and biodiversity in a rapidly changing world. That framing places the journal squarely within the contemporary movement in ecology that treats the discipline not as a purely descriptive science of organisms and their environments, but as a problem-solving enterprise with direct consequences for climate policy, conservation planning, and sustainable development. The editors emphasize that the journal is dedicated to offering valuable insights into the latest advancements in the field, positioning it as a venue where new findings can be disseminated rapidly and without paywalls.

Technically, Discover Ecology operates as a fully open-access, peer-reviewed journal, meaning that every accepted article is made instantly available globally to everyone, free to read and highly discoverable. This publishing model reflects a broader shift in scientific communication, in which the speed and breadth of access are treated as integral to scientific impact rather than incidental to it. For a field like ecology, where findings about species distributions, ecosystem degradation, and climate impacts often carry immediate relevance for land managers, fisheries authorities, and conservation agencies, the removal of subscription barriers is more than a matter of convenience. It is a deliberate design choice intended to ensure that ecological evidence reaches the practitioners and decision makers who need it, including those in institutions and regions that cannot afford subscription-based access.

The journal’s scope is deliberately broad, spanning all fields relevant to ecology, including biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, and ethnology. The inaugural editorial lists an extensive set of topics of interest grouped by section area, and the range is striking. It encompasses behavioural ecology, population ecology, macroecology, biodiversity, the biosphere, plant ecology, animal ecology, ecological theory, the ecological pyramid, ecological conservation, evolutionary ecology, ecophagy, forest ecology, sustainable ecology, desert ecology, animal migration, ecological death, marine ecosystems, aquatic ecology, terrestrial ecology, chemical ecology, and restoration ecology. This cross-cutting structure is designed to emphasize connections between sub-disciplines that have traditionally published in separate venues, encouraging work that bridges, for example, chemical ecology with restoration practice, or macroecological modeling with on-the-ground conservation.

Beyond conventional research papers, the editors make clear that they welcome papers developing new ideas, novelties on species, habitats, ecosystems, methodologies and tools, and work on the evolution of concepts, principles, and the philosophy of ecology. That last category is notable. Few ecology journals explicitly invite scholarship on the conceptual and philosophical foundations of the discipline, and its inclusion suggests that Discover Ecology intends to serve as a forum not only for data-driven studies but also for reflexive examination of how ecologists define their objects of study, from the boundaries of an ecosystem to the ethical dimensions of ecological death and ecophagy, terms that appear in the journal’s topic list and that signal a willingness to engage with less conventional corners of the field.

The journal also aligns itself explicitly with global policy frameworks. The editorial states that Discover Ecology particularly welcomes work that aims to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially Climate Action, Life Below Water, and Life on Land. These three goals map directly onto the core concerns of modern ecology: the climate crisis and its cascading effects on species and ecosystems, the degradation of marine environments, and the accelerating loss of terrestrial biodiversity. By anchoring its priorities to the SDGs, the journal signals to prospective authors that policy-relevant ecological science, including studies that quantify ecosystem change, evaluate restoration interventions, or model future scenarios under warming and land-use change, will be actively sought rather than merely tolerated.

On the governance side, Discover Ecology is in the process of recruiting its Editorial Board Members. The board currently comprises several early career researchers alongside a number of senior experts drawn from various relevant ecological sub-disciplines and sub-domains. The editorial describes a structure in which Section Editors and Editorial Board Members are tasked with executing the journal’s vision and transforming its goals into thoughtful, relevant, and impactful peer-reviewed published works. Their responsibilities include suggesting Topical Collections, review articles, invited articles, and editorials, as well as working with subject expert reviewers to ensure a transparent peer-review system. The inclusion of early career researchers in the board’s composition is a deliberate choice that reflects a growing recognition within scientific publishing that the next generation of ecologists should have a direct hand in shaping the venues where their field’s future work will appear.

The editorial also sets out practical expectations for authors. Manuscripts submitted for review must meet specific requirements of length and novelty in data production, modeling, and analyses, and authors are required to provide their institutional affiliation and official email addresses. These requirements are intended to safeguard the integrity of the peer-review process and to ensure that published work meets standards of novelty rather than merely incremental reporting. In terms of article formats, the journal welcomes submissions of original research, brief communications, comprehensive reviews, perspectives, case studies, and data notes covering any aspect of ecological science, with further detail on length and format available in the submission guidelines on the journal website. The journal also publishes guest-edited Topical Collections of relevance to all aspects of ecology and conservation, a format that allows specialists to assemble clusters of papers around emerging themes.

The invitation to contribute forms the emotional core of the editorial. The editors write that they warmly invite researchers to submit their original research, reviews, perspectives, brief communications, and other accepted article types, arguing that by sharing knowledge, discoveries, and innovations, contributors will play a vital role in advancing ecological science and fostering a global dialogue on sustainability. The closing sentiment, that together the community can shape the future of ecological research and pave the way toward a more sustainable and resilient world, frames the new journal as a collective project rather than a commercial product. For early career scientists in particular, a fully open-access venue with a broad scope and an explicitly interdisciplinary mandate can lower the barriers to publishing work that does not fit neatly into the traditional sub-disciplinary silos of ecology.

The launch of Discover Ecology comes amid intense competition among publishers to establish authoritative open-access outlets in the environmental sciences, and its success will ultimately depend on the quality and visibility of the research it attracts. But the design choices documented in this inaugural editorial, from the fully open-access model and the broad, cross-cutting topic structure to the explicit alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals and the mixed seniority of its editorial board, sketch a coherent vision for what the journal’s founders believe ecological publishing should look like in the coming decades. As biodiversity loss, climate disruption, and ecosystem degradation continue to dominate the global scientific agenda, the arrival of a new venue committed to making ecological findings instantly and freely available to everyone represents a small but meaningful addition to the infrastructure of a field on which the planet’s future increasingly depends.

Subject of Research: The launch and editorial scope of the open-access journal Discover Ecology

Article Title: Inaugural editorial of Discover Ecology

Article References: Cianfaglione, K., & Hu, R. (2025). Inaugural editorial of Discover Ecology. Discover Ecology, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44396-025-00002-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44396-025-00002-z

Keywords: Discover Ecology, Springer Nature, open access, ecology, biodiversity, peer review, conservation, Sustainable Development Goals, interdisciplinary research, ecosystems, scientific publishing, climate action

The authors’ central claim is that global groundwater modelling has delivered an impressive diagnostic picture of depletion but a limited understanding of sustainable use. Over the past decade, large-scale hydrological models have mapped where water tables are falling fastest, from the High Plains aquifer in the United States to the Indo-Gangetic plain and the North China Plain. Studies such as the 2019 analysis led by de Graaf in Nature demonstrated that groundwater depletion is not a local curiosity but a global phenomenon, with falling water tables affecting streamflow and ecosystems across entire river basins. Complementary work by researchers including Bridget Scanlon and Carole Dalin has quantified the dependence of food systems on non-renewable aquifer storage, linking over-pumping to national food security and international food trade. Yet, as the Nature Water perspective points out, these efforts largely stop at the diagnosis.

The gap, according to the authors, lies in how the models are built. Most global assessments treat groundwater as a reservoir to be withdrawn, tracking the volume of water removed from storage. What they rarely capture is the full set of processes that connect pumping to the things society actually cares about: the yield of a wheat field under a given irrigation schedule, the baseflow that keeps a river alive through a dry summer, the depth at which a wetland’s vegetation can no longer reach the water table, or the feedback between soil moisture, evapotranspiration and crop physiology. Without those process-based links, a model can say that an aquifer is being depleted, but it cannot say what will happen to food production or to ecosystems if pumping is reduced by ten, twenty or fifty percent, nor where a given reduction would do the most good or the most harm.

To close this gap, de Graaf and her co-authors, including Anton Urfels of the International Rice Research Institute and Cornell University, Fatemeh Karandish, Sida Liu and Iwan Supit of Wageningen, propose a shift towards integrated, process-based frameworks that support decision-making across scales. In practical terms, this means coupling global groundwater models with crop growth models, ecohydrological representations of surface-water dependency, and the socio-economic realities of farming decisions. Crop models of the kind represented in the literature by work such as that of Joost Kroes on agrohydrology and Joseph Amthor on crop physiology simulate how plants respond to water stress, allowing researchers to translate a change in water availability directly into a change in yield. Ecohydrological theory, advanced by researchers such as Tom Gleeson, Mark Cuthbert and Donald Perrone, describes how aquifers exchange water with rivers and groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and how slowly those connections recover once disturbed.

The perspective also stresses that scale matters in ways current approaches handle poorly. A pumping decision is made by an individual farmer, in a specific field, in a particular season, often in response to rainfall that arrived or failed to arrive weeks earlier. Global models, by contrast, operate on grid cells of tens to hundreds of kilometres and on annual or monthly time steps. Between those two extremes lies the entire chain of cause and effect that determines whether groundwater use is sustainable. The authors argue that frameworks capable of moving information across these scales, from field-level agronomy up to basin-level water allocation and back down again in the form of policy-relevant guidance, are essential if groundwater governance is to be based on evidence rather than on crisis response.

Climate change sharpens the urgency of this argument. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented intensifying droughts and shifting precipitation patterns, and groundwater is increasingly treated as the buffer that will carry agriculture through a more volatile climate. But the perspective warns that treating aquifers as a climate insurance policy without understanding the environmental consequences risks simply transferring one crisis into another. When water tables fall, streams that depend on groundwater discharge lose flow, groundwater-dependent ecosystems degrade, and in coastal regions the void left by fresh water can be invaded by salt. Recent work by de Graaf and colleagues published in Environmental Research Letters in 2024, and by Cuthbert and colleagues in Nature Climate Change in 2019, has shown how slowly these systems respond to changes in pumping, with time lags that can span decades or centuries. Decisions made today may lock in environmental damage long after the agricultural benefits have been realised.

The food security dimension is equally stark. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food and Agriculture reports, along with analyses by Matti Kummu and colleagues on global food security, highlight how much of the world’s food production depends on water supplies that are under stress. In regions such as Iran, where Karandish and colleagues have published detailed analyses in the Journal of Hydrology in 2025, agriculture draws heavily on groundwater in semi-arid conditions where surface water is unreliable. In such settings, the trade-off between pumping for crops and preserving environmental flows is not an abstraction; it plays out every growing season in the choices farmers make about how much to irrigate and where. The authors argue that integrated frameworks can make these trade-offs explicit, quantifying the yield gained per unit of environmental harm and identifying management options, such as adjusted cropping patterns, deficit irrigation or targeted aquifer recharge, that shift the balance.

What distinguishes this perspective from a simple call for more modelling is its emphasis on decision support. The authors are explicit that the goal is not a bigger or more detailed simulation, but a framework that produces information usable by the people who allocate water: basin authorities designing pumping quotas, agricultural agencies advising on crop choices, and international bodies assessing food security risks. That requires models that represent adaptation itself, the ways farmers and water managers respond to scarcity, as part of the system rather than as an afterthought. It also requires honest treatment of uncertainty, since projections of future recharge, crop demand and ecosystem response all carry substantial error bars that decision-makers need to understand rather than ignore.

The work is grounded in a broader research programme. De Graaf leads a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, an ERC Starting Grant that supports the development of the integrated ideas presented in the paper. The perspective draws on a body of literature spanning hydrology, agronomy, environmental science and sustainability studies, from Konikow’s foundational estimates of global groundwater depletion to the recent syntheses of the field’s state of the art. In pulling these threads together, the authors are effectively issuing a roadmap for the next generation of groundwater science: less emphasis on measuring the hole we are digging, more emphasis on understanding the machinery that connects that hole to our food supply and our ecosystems.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Groundwater depletion is already reducing crop yields in some of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, and the ecosystems that depend on aquifers are among the fastest-disappearing on Earth. If the authors are right, the tools that revealed the problem are not, in their current form, the tools that will solve it. Building integrated, process-based frameworks that link the water table to the wheat field and the wetland, and that work at the scales where decisions are actually made, is presented as the necessary next step. Whether the research community and the policy world can build and apply such frameworks fast enough may help determine how much of the world’s hidden water, and the food and ecosystems it sustains, survives the coming decades.

Subject of Research: Integrated process-based groundwater modelling for balancing agricultural irrigation with environmental sustainability

Article Title: Balancing groundwater for crop production and a healthy environment

Article References: de Graaf, I., Urfels, A., Karandish, F., Liu, S., & Supit, I. (2026). Balancing groundwater for crop production and a healthy environment. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00720-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00720-y

Keywords: groundwater, depletion, irrigation, crop production, food security, hydrology, ecosystems, water management, global modelling, climate change, aquifers, sustainability

Soil moisture is not a single reservoir but a layered system. Water held in the top centimeters of soil responds almost immediately to rainfall and evaporation, fluctuating with weather patterns on timescales of hours to days. Deeper layers, by contrast, exchange water with the surface through slow percolation and with plants through root uptake, operating on timescales of weeks, months, and in some environments even years. This multilayer structure means that drought is a cumulative phenomenon. A single hot, dry summer may barely register in deep soil, but consecutive dry seasons can progressively drain these reserves, leaving ecosystems without the subsurface lifeline they rely upon when precipitation fails.

The researchers assembled global observational datasets and model-based reconstructions of soil moisture at multiple depths, combined with satellite-derived vegetation activity metrics and terrestrial ecosystem observations. By partitioning soil moisture into surface and deeper components, they were able to isolate the contribution of each layer to vegetation health during drought episodes. Their analysis revealed a consistent pattern across biomes: the loss of moisture in deeper soil layers correlates more strongly with vegetation decline, reduced carbon uptake, and long-term ecosystem stress than the loss of moisture at the surface. Surface drought, while visible and dramatic, is often transient; deep drought, the study shows, is what determines whether an ecosystem recovers or deteriorates.

This distinction has profound implications for how drought severity is measured and communicated. Many widely used drought indicators are either atmospheric, tracking precipitation deficits and evaporative demand, or near-surface, relying on shallow soil measurements and satellite retrievals that only penetrate the top few centimeters. Such indicators may signal the onset of drought but can miss its accumulation in the subsurface. The new findings suggest that ecosystems may already be suffering severe, lasting damage during periods when surface indicators suggest conditions are moderate or even improving. In effect, the subsurface acts as a hidden ledger, recording the true balance of water supply and demand over seasons and years.

The mechanisms linking deep soil moisture depletion to ecosystem harm are rooted in plant physiology. Many dominant vegetation types, from temperate forests to tropical savannas, depend on deep root systems to access water stored well below the surface during dry periods. When these deeper reserves are exhausted, plants face hydraulic stress that cascades through their tissues: reduced stomatal conductance limits photosynthesis, carbon uptake declines, and prolonged stress increases vulnerability to pests, pathogens, and mortality. Because deep soil moisture returns slowly, a single severe depletion event can impair ecosystem function for years, even after rainfall returns to normal levels.

The global scale of the analysis allowed the team to identify regions where multilayer depletion is particularly consequential. Water-limited environments such as Mediterranean ecosystems, temperate grasslands, and boreal forests emerged as areas where deep-layer dynamics strongly modulate vegetation responses to drought. In these regions, the study found that droughts accompanied by deep soil moisture depletion produced markedly larger and more persistent impacts on vegetation greenness and productivity than droughts of comparable surface severity but with intact subsurface reserves. The results underscore that two droughts with identical atmospheric signatures can produce very different ecological outcomes depending on the state of the soil profile beneath them.

Climate change adds a worrying dimension to these findings. Warmer temperatures increase evaporative demand, drawing moisture from the soil surface and, through sustained stress, from deeper layers as well. At the same time, shifts in precipitation patterns, including longer dry spells and more intense but less frequent rainfall events, can reduce the recharge of deep soil moisture, since heavy rains often run off rather than percolating gradually through the profile. The combination of rising demand and diminished recharge creates conditions in which deep droughts become more frequent and more severe, compounding the stress on ecosystems already near their physiological limits. The study’s authors caution that this trajectory could accelerate ecosystem degradation in vulnerable regions in the coming decades.

The findings also carry significant implications for carbon cycle science and climate modeling. Vegetation that is drought-stressed absorbs less carbon dioxide, weakening the terrestrial carbon sink that currently offsets a substantial fraction of human emissions. If Earth system models underestimate the role of deep soil moisture depletion, they may overstate the resilience of the land carbon sink and understate future atmospheric carbon dioxide growth. Incorporating multilayer soil moisture dynamics into models is therefore not a technical refinement but a necessity for accurate projections of both ecosystem futures and the global climate system itself. The researchers emphasize that observational networks capable of monitoring moisture at depth, including in situ sensors and gravimetric satellite missions, deserve expanded investment.

For land managers and policymakers, the message is equally clear. Drought early warning systems built on surface indicators alone may provide a false sense of security. Monitoring programs that track deeper soil moisture, and restoration strategies that protect the soil processes enabling deep recharge, could substantially improve resilience planning for agriculture, forestry, and conservation. As the study demonstrates, the most dangerous droughts are not always the most visible ones. Beneath a deceptively normal-looking surface, the slow draining of deep soil moisture may already be writing the next chapter of global ecosystem stress, one that will only become apparent when the damage has accumulated beyond recovery.

Subject of Research: Multilayer soil moisture depletion and its intensifying effects of drought on global ecosystems

Article Title: Multilayer soil moisture depletion intensifies drought impacts on global ecosystems

Article References: Gu, X., Wang, R., Chen, D., Miao, C., Luo, S., Guan, Y., Wang, S., Li, L., Gu, T., Luo, C., Li, J., Huang, S., Li, X., Wu, J., Zhang, X., & Wang, L. (2026). Multilayer soil moisture depletion intensifies drought impacts on global ecosystems. Nature Geoscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-02083-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41561-026-02083-1

Keywords: soil moisture, drought, ecosystems, deep soil layers, vegetation stress, Nature Geoscience, hydrology, climate change, carbon cycle, land degradation, drought indicators, Earth system models