For Editors

Read the manuscript against the journal's scope before anything else. Ask whether the work advances understanding of plants, animals, their interactions or the ecological systems they belong to, and whether the ecological reasoning is carried by the study itself.

A manuscript outside scope is better declined promptly, with a short reason, than carried through a review it cannot survive.

Choose reviewers with demonstrable expertise in the organisms, system and methods at issue, and look beyond the immediate circle of the authors. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.

Check for conflicts before inviting: recent co-authorship, shared institution, shared funding, or a personal relationship. An author's suggested reviewers may be considered but must never make up the whole panel.

Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. When double-blind review is requested, editors must ensure that author-identifying information is not shared with reviewers.

Manuscript content is confidential. It must not be shared, discussed outside the review, or used for any other purpose.

Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.

Weigh the reviews rather than counting them: a single well-argued report can outweigh two cursory ones. Where reviewers disagree substantively, seek a further opinion rather than splitting the difference. Give authors reasons they can act on.

Decisions remain independent of fees, services, memberships, and editorial or reviewer roles. An editor who learns of a payment, membership or service arrangement in connection with a manuscript disregards it.

Editors recuse themselves from manuscripts they authored or co-authored, from those of close collaborators, and from any case where their judgment could reasonably be questioned. Recused manuscripts are reassigned to another editor.

Concerns about plagiarism, data integrity, image manipulation, undisclosed conflicts, authorship disputes, duplicate submission or missing ethical approval are referred to the editorial office rather than resolved informally.

Similarity reports inform a contextual editorial assessment of originality and attribution; a percentage is not a finding in itself.

Concerns raised about a published article are assessed against the journal's policies, and a correction or retraction notice is published where one is warranted. The procedure is set out in the Editorial Policies.