Editors' Choice paper for the second quarter of 2025

Every three months, the VCS Chief Editors select an Editors’ Choice paper of the quarter. All of them are highlighted on the journal website and one of the four selected papers then gets the Editors’ Award of the year.

For the second quarter of 2025, the Editors’ Choice goes to Tiago Monteiro-Henriques for his VCS Methods paper: “TDV-optimization: A novel numerical method for phytosociological tabulation”. In his paper, Monteiro-Henriques introduces a new method for vegetation classification, called TDV-optimization. TDV stands for Total Differential Value, the average of the Differential Values (DiffVal) of all species in a vegetation table. 

The author makes an interesting distinction between stochastic and differentiating absences of species. The DiffVal of each species ranges from 0 to 1 and indicates how well a certain species reflects the separation of relevé groups of any number in a vegetation table. Using TDV as a measure how well a partition of relevés in a table into vegetation types is supported by differential species, makes it feasible to search for the “optimal” partitioning by a computer, and the author developed an R package for this purpose. 

In the paper the author further tests the performance of his new method compared to previous automatic and manual methods of partitioning used in vegetation science with a real and with an artificial dataset and generally found that TDV-optimization does well. 

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

“The paper convinces with the clarity of concepts and presentation and a broad and informed review of previous numerical approaches for this core task of vegetation classification, such as k-means clustering, modified TWINSPAN, DIANA or ISOPAM. With these properties, Monteiro-Henriques has the potential to become a seminal text in the scientific discipline and highly cited as several other VCS Methods papers before.”

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