Journal of Ecology would like to announce the creation of a new subject category; Global Change Ecology. We would like to encourage submissions on this topic, and when submitting your work to the journal, you will now have the option to select this category.

To mark this occasion, we have prepared a special virtual issue titled; Plants in a changing world: global change and plant ecology. The virtual issue consists of 21 papers previously published in the journal, which are free to access for a limited time. The papers were chosen by Amy Austin, Senior Editor, who introduces the virtual issue below…

Human activity is affecting every corner of the planet – not just climatic change observed as altered precipitation and increasing global temperature. The impacts of land use change, invasion of non-native species and even political conflicts can have wide-ranging and often major effects on plant ecology. In this virtual issue, we have collected a set of papers published in Journal of Ecology that focus on the wide range of ways in which human beings are causing changes in terrestrial and aquatic environments, and some of the means by which plants are responding to these changes.

From the consequences for plant diversity of the well-documented warming in the Arctic to the often unconsidered effects of civil war on plant-herbivore interactions, this collection provides an overview of some of the fascinating and important work that is being done to try to understand how plants are dealing with a changing world. While much of the news is worrisome, some results highlight the capacity of plants to respond to global changes in ingenious and surprising ways, which provides hope for the integrity of ecosystems in the inescapable future of a world altered by human activity.

Amy Austin, Senior Editor, Journal of Ecology 

View the full virtual issue here, and submit your Global Change Ecology papers here.