Editors’ Award 2025 goes to a study uncovering the floristic patterns in northern Patagonia’s forests
For a fifth year in a row, the Chief editors at the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal awarded one of the publications in the last completed journal annual volume for its outstanding scientific value.
In line with the tradition at VCS, the awarded contribution is one of the four papers selected as Editors’ Choice in the quarterly contest held at the journal.
The 2025 Editors’ Award goes to the team of Natalia Zoe Joelson and their paper, titled “Floristic patterns in the Andes of northern Patagonia’s forests, Argentina: towards integrating ecological responses with expert-based and unsupervised classification methods”
The research team collected 141 vegetation plots of 100 m2 with stratified systematic sampling, aiming for good representation of both elevation and moisture gradients covering the different parts of the study. Based on this sampling, the authors conducted comprehensive statistical analyses, including unsupervised classification, ordination, indicator species analyses and ANOVAs to compare the properties of the derived communities. The authors distinguished six community types, each well characterised by diagnostic species, and matched them with described phytosociological associations.
“Since South America is still poorly covered by plot-based vegetation studies in general and by formal syntaxonomic studies in particular, this paper is an important contribution to widening the state of knowledge on the vegetation in Patagonia and South America in general.”, explained the Chief editors.
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List of the 2025 Editors’ Choice Papers by quarter:
1. Floristic patterns in the Andes of northern Patagonia’s forests, Argentina: towards integrating ecological responses with expert-based and unsupervised classification methods by Natalia Zoe Joelson (see more)
2. TDV-optimization: A novel numerical method for phytosociological tabulation by Tiago Monteiro-Henriques (see more)
3. A National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain by Zeke Marshall et al. (see more)
4. Soil and season shape less intensively managed agro-ecosystems of a Mediterranean island—Insights from Lemnos (Greece) by Lina Rinne et al. (see more); This research is also part of the collection: 'Vegetation classification of islands and archipelagos'.
Cover image photos credit to Natalia Joelson.
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