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