JVS and AVS Editors’ Awards for 2024

The 2024 Editors’ Award for the Journal of Vegetation Science goes to Andrew Siefert, Daniel Laughlin and Francesco Sabatini.

Siefert, A., D. C. Laughlin, and F. M. Sabatini. 2024. “You shall know a species by the company it keeps: Leveraging co‐occurrence data to improve ecological prediction.” Journal of Vegetation Science 35: e13314. https://doi.or/10.1111/jvs.13314

This methodological article demonstrates the use of species co-occurrence data to make ecological predictions. The authors introduce and evaluate an innovative method for encoding species co-occurrence data into low-dimensional vectors, capturing distinct ecological information that may not be apparent in traits or phylogeny. They tested the method using species co-occurrence data from sPlotOpen, a global vegetation plot database. The vectors were then applied to predict species elevation range shifts using an independent data set from European mountains. The new method improved the predictive power compared to using traits or phylogeny.

The 2024 Editors’ Award for Applied Vegetation Science goes to Lina Lüttgert and co-authors.

Lüttgert, L., F. Jansen, R. Kaufmann, G. Seidler, A. Wedler, and H. Bruelheide. 2024. “Linking trends of habitat types and plant species using repeated habitat mapping data”. Applied Vegetation Science 27: e12799. https://doi.org/10.1111/avsc.12799.

The ongoing changes in habitats and the abundance and distribution of species in landscapes are important research topics. However, individual studies focus either on changes in habitat area (e.g. studies based on remote sensing) or on changes in habitat quality, such as the decline of characteristic or threatened species. It is usually assumed that the decline in habitat area correlates with the decline in habitat quality, but is this always the case? Lina Lüttgert and collaborators used data from repeated habitat mapping and data on plant species occurrence from southwestern Germany over the last three decades and compared the changes in habitat area with changes in species occurrence. They found that in some habitats, such as grasslands, the decline in habitat area is correlated with the decline in species characteristic of that habitat. However, this is not always the case. For example, the area of deciduous forests in southwestern Germany increased, but the abundance of the deciduous forest’s characteristic species decreased. An important lesson from this study is that conclusions based on the assessment of changes in habitat quantity cannot be interpreted as changes in habitat quality.