Editors' Choice paper of the fourth quarter of 2024

21 January 2025

A research article that study the high-Andean wetland (bofedal) vegetation in the Peruvian Andes and report 13 communities along a 68-kilometre longitudinal transect dominated by Distichia muscoides, was recognised as the Editors’ Choice paper published in the fourth quarter of 2024 in the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal.

Authored by Mónica Maldonado-Fonkén (CORBIDI, Peru) and her team: Héctor Chuquillanqui, Bruno Vildoso and Reynaldo Linares-Palomino, the study is titled “Plant communities of high-Andean bofedal wetlands across a trans-Andean transect in southern Peru” and belongs in the special collection: “Neotropical vegetation”, which was launched in 2022 by the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) with the aim to provide new insights into vegetation classification-related research across the Neotropical biogeographic realm. Interestingly, the contribution by Maldonado-Fonken et al. is the fifth paper in the collection to receive the quarterly recognition by the Chief Editors of the VCS journal.

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

“These bofedal communities occurring at elevations of 4,200 to 4,800 m a.s.l. in the Andes are very peculiar plant communities if compared to other wetlands globally. They typically consist of mono-dominant stands of cushion plants from different plant families with very dense and hard leaves,” they say in a blog post, published on the Vegetation Science Blog, the official blog of the IAVS journals.

“This paper demonstrates the high diversity and heterogeneity of these community types, from plot to regional scales.”

The Chief Editors also use the occasion to encourage and invite all IAVS working groups and regional sections to consider organising similar special collections in the VCS journal.


Image caption: Sampling plot in a high Andean Distichia muscoides community. Photo credit: Maldonado-Fonken et al. (2024).


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