The journal’s own output dipped slightly in 2022, to 23 articles and 296 pages, a decrease of roughly 8 and 5 percent respectively compared with the previous year. On its face that might look like trouble for a young title still searching for its first Impact Factor. But when the editors benchmarked themselves against ten international journals of vegetation science, geobotany and ecology, a striking pattern emerged: not a single one of the compared journals reached its maximum annual output in 2022. The three general ecology titles in the comparison, Journal of Ecology, Ecography and Journal of Biogeography, peaked in 2019 and have declined since, while the vegetation-focused journals Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science and Tuexenia peaked in 2020. Only Vegetation Classification and Survey and Flora reached their peak in 2021, and the drop from that maximum to 2022 was smaller for the young journal than for any of its peers. Applied Vegetation Science, its sister publication, lost 17 percent, while the other journals fell by at least 25 percent, with Phytocoenologia plunging by 62 percent.

The editors offer two possible explanations for this industry-wide contraction, while cautioning that a full analysis lies beyond the scope of their report. First, the number of publication outlets may simply be growing faster than the production of scientific articles, and some authors appear to be migrating toward open access journals with dubious peer review practices, where a lack of quality can be compensated for by paying article processing charges. The drastic growth of journals from publishers with such practices during the same period lends weight to this concern. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic may have reshaped the rhythm of field ecology itself: with travel and fieldwork restricted in 2020 and partly in 2021, many ecologists stayed at home and wrote up older datasets, whereas in 2022 they returned to the field to collect new data, temporarily reducing the flow of finished manuscripts.

What makes the young journal’s resilience notable is that it has achieved this without an Impact Factor, the metric that most authors treat as a proxy for prestige. The journal applied for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection, with the application still under review, but it was already accepted into Scopus, the largest bibliometric database globally, in early 2022. All articles from the journal’s first issue onward are now indexed there, and since late 2022 the freely accessible Scopus Preview service provides a monthly updated CiteScoreTracker, effectively a running forecast of the first official CiteScore, which is due to be published in mid-2023.

The centerpiece of the 2022 volume, and the winner of the journal’s annual Editors’ Award, is a study by Changcheng Liu and colleagues that delivers something ecologists have long needed: a comprehensive, data-driven classification of the steppe vegetation of China. Drawing on high-quality data from 1,337 vegetation plots distributed across all grassland areas of China and adjacent Mongolia, the team applied cluster analyses followed by statistical determination of indicator species to organize the Chinese steppes into five biogeographic groups, 26 alliances and 91 associations, plus 12 additional communities. Crucially, the system was built to be compatible with the International Vegetation Classification, also known as the EcoVeg approach, which means the Chinese units can in principle be compared directly with classified vegetation elsewhere in the world. The work demonstrates how subjective, expert-based classifications that dominated twentieth-century phytosociology can be replaced by transparent, reproducible classifications grounded in plot data, and it fills a major gap in efforts to produce a unified treatment of all Palaearctic steppes.

The four quarterly Editors’ Choice awards of 2022 sketch a portrait of where the field is heading. In the first quarter, Miguel Alvarez and Federico Luebert were recognized for an ambitious attempt to build a bridge between the two dominant schools of vegetation classification, the European Braun-Blanquet approach and the EcoVeg approach, using the vegetation of Chile as their test case; their synthesis of the country’s known vegetation types lays the groundwork for filling gaps and for international comparison. The third-quarter award went to Nicola Alessi and colleagues for a Long Database Report presenting AMS-VegBank, a new Italian vegetation-plot database associated with the University of Bologna, which fills significant data gaps in Italy and was written up in a form the editors suggest could serve as a prototype for similar reports worldwide. The fourth-quarter prize went to Javier Loidi and colleagues for a review and synthesis that redefines the terrestrial biomes of the globe, building on a previous award-winning analysis of biome definitions to establish nine biomes and 20 subbiomes, each carefully characterized and mapped to facilitate application in global vegetation ecology and macroecology.

Behind these individual papers lies a broader editorial strategy built around Special Collections, themed article clusters that act as the backbone of the journal. Two collections were concluded in 2021: one on the classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types across the Palaearctic, comprising eight articles and 176 pages and closed with an editorial reviewing the strikingly uneven state of knowledge across that vast biogeographic realm, and another on the International Vegetation Classification initiative, with eight papers and 146 pages awaiting its concluding editorial. Among the highlighted contributions are two crosswalk studies, by Willner and Faber-Langendoen for Europe and by Alvarez and Luebert for Chile, both showing that the Braun-Blanquet and EcoVeg approaches are far less disjunct than often assumed, raising genuine hope for convergence toward a uniform global classification system. Three new collections have now been launched to stimulate work on the three most diverse yet underrepresented continents: African vegetation studies, Grasslands of Asia, and Neotropical vegetation, each produced in partnership with Regional Sections and Working Groups of the International Association for Vegetation Science, with submissions still open for the Asian grasslands collection.

The journal has also carved out a distinctive niche in database documentation through an exclusive collaboration with the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases, a registry whose unique identifiers underpin the two largest vegetation-plot archives in the world, the European Vegetation Archive and sPlot. In 2022 the journal published three Short Database Reports and four Long Database Reports, making these the prevailing article category of the year. The format benefits everyone involved: authors gain citations whenever their data are reused and attract collaborators, while the community gains a citable, standardized description of datasets that might otherwise remain invisible. By contrast, the journal’s flagship methodological article type, VCS Methods, saw no submissions in 2022, a gap the editors are actively trying to close. They point to two exemplars: a 2021 paper on combining vegetation sampling with farmer interviews, and an early 2023 contribution presenting the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe, a consensus system covering nearly 15,000 vascular plant taxa that was derived by mathematically reconciling 31 national and regional indicator systems into a single open access database. Methods papers, the editors stress, could address any step of the workflow, from field sampling through data harmonization to classification and ordination.

The editorial closes with a call to the community that doubles as a statement of values. Four new members have joined the Editorial Review Board, including the award-winning Liu, and the journal’s Linguistic Editor service, in which ecologists fluent in scientific English polish accepted manuscripts at no charge to authors, ensures that language is never a discriminating factor for researchers publishing in a second tongue. Applications are open until the end of March 2023 for the review board and the linguistic team, with the editors explicitly encouraging candidates based outside Europe, early-career researchers and women to apply. Meanwhile, the International Association for Vegetation Science has extended its waiver of article processing charges for members until 30 June 2023, removing the main financial barrier that the founders once feared would sink the venture. With a first CiteScore imminent, a Web of Science decision pending, and a publication record that has decoupled from an industry-wide downturn, the third-year report reads less like a routine accounting exercise and more like the early chapters of a success story in a discipline that is quietly rebuilding its foundations, one classified plot at a time.

Subject of Research: Annual editorial report on the development, bibliometric recognition and key publications of the journal Vegetation Classification and Survey

Article Title: Vegetation Classification and Survey in the third year

Article References: Dengler, J., Biurrun, I., Jansen, F., & Willner, W. (2023). Vegetation Classification and Survey in the third year. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 4, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.100394

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/VCS.100394

Keywords: vegetation classification, Vegetation Classification and Survey, open access, Scopus, CiteScore, steppe vegetation, EcoVeg, Braun-Blanquet, vegetation-plot databases, biomes, Palaearctic grasslands, ecological publishing