Wednesday 8 March 2017 is International Women’s Day, a global day to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Needless to say, at Journal of Ecology we’d like to give particular mention to the scientific achievements of women as well.

International Women’s Day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. We are all for it and are trying to address issues around gender balance where we can. We are proud to have a healthy proportion (45%) of excellent female ecologists on our editorial board (a figure reflecting the proportion of women in the BES membership) and are lucky to call Amy Austin, who was awarded the L’Oréal-UNESCO prize for Women in Science in Argentina in late 2015, one of our Senior Editors.

A good proportion of our authors and reviewers are of course female as well. We don’t have exact figures yet, but a project is underway to shed more light on their numbers, so watch this space!

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is #BeBoldForChange, which recognises the need to challenge bias and inequality, celebrate women’s achievements, champion women’s education and more.

In that vein, Journal of Ecology would like to celebrate some of the finest work published by women in the Journal so far in 2017 and shout a wholehearted THANK YOU! out to all the women who do an awful lot of reading, authoring, submitting, editing, cajoling and deciding of and for the Journal.

#BeBoldForChange and enjoy!

Influence of plant–pollinator interactions on the assembly of plant and hummingbird communities, Marina Wolowski et al.

Evidence for a stochastic geometry of biodiversity: the effects of species abundance, richness and intraspecific clustering, Julia Chacón-Labella et al.

Ecological outsourcing: a pitcher plant benefits from transferring pre-digestion of prey to a bat mutualist, Caroline Schöner et al.

Recovery following defoliation involves shifts in allocation that favour storage and reproduction over radial growth in black oak, Erin Wiley et al.

Separating sources of density-dependent and density-independent establishment limitation in invading species, Erica Spotswood et al.

Anti-epiphyte defences in the red seaweed Gracilaria vermiculophylla: non-native algae are better defended than their native conspecifics, Shasha Wang et al.

Instant death, slow death and the consequences of assumptions about prolonged dormancy for plant population dynamics, Kirsi Alahuhta et al.

Lagging behind: have we overlooked previous-year rainfall effects in annual grasslands?, Joan Dudney et al.

Bryophyte traits explain climate-warming effects on tree seedling establishment, Signe Lett et al.

‘Are 3 °C too much?’: thermal niche breadth in Bromeliaceae and global warming, Lilian-Lee Müller et al.

Host species and environmental variation can influence rhizobial community composition, Holly Vuong et al.

Facilitated exploitation of pollination mutualisms: fitness consequences for plants, Sarah Richman et al.

Effects of pollination intensity on offspring number and quality in a wind-pollinated herb, Anne-Marie Labouche et al.

Constraints of cold and shade on the phenology of spring ephemeral herb species, Carol Augspurger et al.

Trait-associated loss of frugivores in fragmented forest does not affect seed removal rates, Nina Farwig et al.

Extended dispersal kernels in a changing world: insights from statistics of extremes, Cristina García et al.

Precipitation, not air temperature, drives functional responses of trees in semi-arid ecosystems, Charlotte Grossiord et al.

The Journal of Ecology team