Editors' Choice paper for the third quarter of 2025

Every three months, the VCS Chief Editors select an Editors’ Choice paper of the quarter. The winning papers are highlighted on the journal website and one will go on to win the Editors’ Award of the year.

For the third quarter of 2025, the Editors’ Choice goes to Marshall et al. for their Long Database Report presenting the new National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain (GBNVPD). 

'A National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain' combines several pre-existing smaller databases with numerous other datasets that were previously not easily available. With 277,070 plot observations (including numerous resurveyed plots), it is now the second-largest national vegetation-plot database in Europe after the one from the Netherlands.

Why did the journal's Chief Editors choose this particular paper?

“This is an extremely valuable asset for biodiversity, global change and conservation studies at the national level and at the same time will massively improve the data coverage of NW Europe in continental and global studies based on the European Vegetation Archive (EVA; Chytrý et al. 2016) and the global database “sPlot” (Bruelheide et al. 2019). 

“Moreover, with carefully curated fields of in situ measured environmental variables, this database sets a new standard for national vegetation plot databases. We thus can only congratulate Zeke Marshall and his team for this important achievement.”