Aims and Scope · Open Access Pub
Aims and Scope
ISSN 2637-6075 · Open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license · Published by Open Access Pub
The Journal of Plant and Animal Ecology publishes research on plants and animals in their habitats: how organisms live, how they interact with one another, and how they respond to and shape the environments around them. This page sets out what the journal considers, across which systems and scales, and what makes a manuscript a fit for it.
What the journal asks
Four questions the journal exists to answer
Ecology is the study of relationships, and the relationships that matter most in this field run between plants and animals rather than staying on one side of them. The journal is organized around the questions below rather than around a list of organisms or an inventory of what it has published before.
- How do organisms make a living where they live? Physiology, behavior, life history and demography studied in natural or realistically manipulated settings, and the environmental variation organisms respond to.
- What holds an assemblage together, and what pulls it apart? Interactions between plants and animals and among them — herbivory, predation, pollination, dispersal, competition, facilitation and symbiosis — and the community patterns that follow.
- How do habitats and ecosystems function, and how are they changing? Nutrient cycling, energy flow, productivity, habitat structure, disturbance, succession, and the effects of land use, climate and contaminants on all of them.
- What follows for conservation and management? Work that connects ecological evidence to conservation, restoration, managed harvest or environmental protection, where the ecological reasoning is carried by the study itself.
Scales and systems
Where the journal looks
Work is welcome at any of these scales, and studies that cross between them are particularly welcome, since the connection between scales is often where the ecological interest lies.
Organisms and populations
- Ecophysiology and life history in natural settings
- Behavior, foraging and habitat use
- Demography, dispersal and population genetics
- Responses to environmental variation
Communities and interactions
- Species assemblages and community dynamics
- Herbivory, predation, pollination and dispersal
- Competition, facilitation and symbiosis
- Food webs and trophic structure
Ecosystems and landscapes
- Nutrient cycling, energy flow and ecosystem function
- Habitat structure, disturbance and succession
- Land use, climate and contaminants as drivers
- Conservation, restoration and managed harvest
Systems
Forms of contribution
How ecological work reaches the journal
The journal is interested in the contribution a manuscript makes, not in the label attached to it. The forms below describe how contributions usually arrive; the editorial office can advise on the most suitable form for a particular study.
The boundary
What makes a submission a fit
A manuscript is in scope when
it advances understanding of plants, animals, their interactions or the ecological systems they belong to, and the ecological reasoning is carried by the study itself. The method should suit the question: observational, experimental, comparative, theoretical, computational and synthesis approaches are all appropriate where they answer what is being asked.
Both fundamental questions and applied questions in conservation and management are within the remit, and a study need not have an applied outcome to belong here.
It falls outside when
plants, animals or the environment appear only incidentally — as a source of material, a test substrate or a setting — and the work makes no ecological argument. A chemical, agronomic, veterinary or biomedical study is welcome when it is framed and tested as ecology, and belongs in a specialist journal when it is not.
Scope is assessed on the manuscript as submitted, and authors who are unsure are encouraged to ask the editorial office before preparing a full submission.
How scope is applied
Assessment against this scope
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. Decisions remain independent of fees, services, memberships, and editorial or reviewer roles.
Where to go next
Taking a manuscript further
- About the Journal What the journal is, who it serves and what it has published
- Instructions for Authors Preparing a manuscript for this journal
- Editorial Policies Ethics, integrity, conflicts of interest and corrections
- Archives All 16 published records, by volume and issue
- Call for Papers The journal's standing invitation to submit
- Submit Manuscript The approved submission routes