Vegetation Classification and Survey: five years and looking ahead
Prepared by Jürgen Dengler (on behalf of all VCS Chief Editors)
On occasion of the completion of the fifth annual volume, the Chief Editors of Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS), looked both back and forward. The annual editorial 2025 provides a comprehensive analysis of the 119 articles published so far (Biurrun et al. 2025). While Research Papers are the prevailing article type, there were also 10 other article types represented. Some of them are exclusive to this journal, namely the CCCN Reports and Nomenclatural Proposals in collaboration with IAVS’ Working Group on Phytosociological Nomenclature and the Long and Short Database Reports in collaboration with the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD). About one third of the content were regular articles, one third belonged to the two permanent collections (Phytosociological Nomenclature, Ecoinformatics) and the last third to six special collections, mostly organised together with one or two IAVS Working Groups or Regional Sections.
Distribution of the 119 papers published in the first five volumes of VCS according to article types and collections (from Biurrun et al. 2025).
According to the scope, papers developing, revising or implementing classifications systems strongly prevailed in VCS. Among them, plot-based classification systems contributed the biggest share, but there were also some contributions referring to formations, biomes or remote-sensing based units. We are particularly happy to announce that while there was a slight prevalence of European contributions, our plot-based classification papers were spread nicely across all continents except Antarctica. Most of them developed/applied formal Braun-Blanquetian or EcoVeg classification systems, while in some countries that lack a strong history of either of these two main approaches, authors used informal units for the time being.
The editorial also contains some bibliometric assessments. The good news is that the Scopus CiteScoreTracker 2024 is now at 3.6 (i.e. a 44% increase from the CiteScore 2023 of 2.5). With Clarivate having almost completely databased the journal articles published in 2024, the first Journal Impact Factor to be published in June 2025 can be forecasted as 2.9 (reflecting the citations in 2024 to articles of the years 2022 and 2023). While a wide range of articles contributed to this great success, some were particularly impactful. Based on the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) by Scopus, which normalises citation numbers by publication year, subject field and article type, the by far most influential article to date were the Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (Dengler et al. 2023), but also the two other contributions in the category “VCS Methods”, Janišová et al. (2021) on a transdisciplinary approach to grassland studies and Dengler & Dembicz (2023) on cover estimation methods, were highly cited. Moreover, one “Review and Synthesis” paper with a comprehensive re-definition of the biomes and subbiomes of the world by Loidi et al. (2022) had an outstanding performance.
Thus, for the future development of VCS, we encourage our authors not only to submit their best classification papers with any approach and at any spatial scale to VCS, but also relevant methodological contributions and comprehensive reviews and syntheses on topics within the scope of VCS. Particularly for large classification studies and “Review and Synthesis” papers, VCS is attractive as it allows substantially longer articles than most other journals (provided the content justifies the length).
Last but not least, we would like to say a big thank you to Florian Jansen who decided to step down from his role as Chief Editor after the initial years. Without Florian, VCS would not be as successful as it has become within such short time. However, Florian is not completely lost for VCS but will continue as an Associate Editor. We are also happy to announce the appointment of three new Associate Editors, namely Gwendolyn Peyre (Colombia), Ute Schmiedel (Germany, but with main research activities in Southern Africa) and Denys Vynokurov (Ukraine and Germany).
References:
- Biurrun, I., Dengler, J. & Willner, W. 2025. Vegetation Classification and Survey: five years and looking ahead. Vegetation Classification and Survey 6: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.148065
- Dengler, J. & Dembicz, I. 2023. Should we estimate plant cover in percent or on ordinal scales? Vegetation Classification and Survey 4: 131–138. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.98379. See also https://vegsciblog.org/2023/08/14/should-we-estimate-plant-cover-in-percent-or-on-ordinal-scales/
- Dengler, J., Jansen, F., Chusova, O., Hüllbusch, E., Nobis, M.P., Van Meerbeek, K., Axmanová, I., Bruun, H.H., Chytrý, M., (…) Gillet, F. 2023. Ecological Indicator Values for Europe (EIVE) 1.0. Vegetation Classification and Survey 4: 7–29. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.98324. See also https://vegsciblog.org/2023/01/21/eive-1-0/
- Janišová, M., Iuga, A., Ivaşcu, C.M. & Magnes, M 2021. Grassland with tradition: sampling across several scientific disciplines Vegetation Classification and Survey 2: 19–35. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS/2021/60739. See also https://vegsciblog.org/2021/03/19/grassland-with-tradition/
- Loidi, J., Navarro-Sánchez, G. & Vynokurov, D. 2022. Climatic definitions of the world’s terrestrial biomes. Vegetation Classification and Survey 3: 231–271. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.86102. See also https://vegsciblog.org/2023/01/15/climatic-definitions-of-terrestrial-biomes/