The BES annual meeting is officially over, and what an amazing meeting it was! See the summary from Journal of Ecology’s Executive Editor David Gibson for his insight into #BES2015. Take note of the Special Features on two of the thematic topics that we hope to publish in the Journal over the next 12 months (“Digging Deeper – Advancing our Understanding of how Soil Biota Drive and Respond to Plant Invasions,” and “Dispersal Processes Driving Plant Movement: Challenges for Range Shifts in a Changing World”). It was great to attend these sessions and meet with the organisers.

I have lots of additional personal highlights. I always love going to the annual meeting to meet the people that I communicate with on a daily basis that I rarely get an opportunity to meet with in person. Thanks to all the members of the Journal of Ecology editorial board that made the meeting so great and to the authors and reviewers that I *FINALLY* got a chance to speak to. Congratulations to the 2015, Journal of Ecology, Harper Prize winner Michiel Veldhuis who was awarded his prize at the Gala dinner for his paper “A novel mechanism for grazing lawn formation: large herbivore-induced modification of the plant–soil water balance”. The ceilidh that followed the awards went to another level this year; there was barely room to move on the dance floor!

Journals on the BES stand

The BES publications team organised two workshops. On Monday Chris Grieves (Assistant Editor of Methods in Ecology & Evolution) organised a fantastically engaging workshop on SEO and how to maximise the exposure of your research. Charlie Rapple from Kudos spoke at length about the benefits of SEO, and the slides will be available online soon for those who couldn’t make it. Then on Tuesday Simon Hoggart (Assistant Editor of Journal of Animal Ecology) organised a panel discussion on data archiving chaired by Chuck Fox. The debate that ensued was really insightful. If you couldn’t make this workshop you can still follow some of the discussion on Twitter #BESDataQA.

SEO workshop

On Tuesday evening the BES’ Communications Manager, Richard English, and Iain Stott both organised the first BES annual meeting LGBT+ mixer, which I also went to. Richard, Iain and I are all involved in the BES’ equality & diversity working group, which was launched earlier in 2015. It was great to meet so many people and it is highly likely that this mixer has set the precedent for future meetings. I am always keen to hear people’s thoughts on equality and diversity best practice within the ecological community so that I can feed this information back to the BES’ E&D group. Do not hesitate to get in touch with me with any thoughts.

I hope that all of the delegates enjoyed #BES2015 as much as the Journal of Ecology editorial team did. See you all in Liverpool next year!

Whilst we were at the meeting the new issue (104.1) of Journal of Ecology was published. The inaugural Harper Review, “Does the biogeographic origin of species matter? Ecological effects of native and non-native species and the use of origin to guide management”, authored by Yvonne Buckley and Jane Catford is now online.  We are also really pleased to publish our third commentary paper by Mark Dixon and John Stella. The commentary focuses on “Temporal variability in hydrology modifies the influence of geomorphology on wetland distribution along a desert stream” by Dong et al. Very shortly the whole of issue 104.1 will be free to access so stay tuned for that.

Lauren Sandhu
Assistant Editor, Journal of Ecology