Progress in vegetation science: Trends over the past three decades and new horizons

摘要

With the current issue, the Journal of Vegetation Science (JVS) enters its 30th year. Founded by Eddy van der Maarel, Robert Peet and Robert Neuhäusl in 1990 as an official journal of the International Association for Vegetation Science, it has always been a popular publication venue for the internationally most significant studies in plant community ecology. Browsing over almost 3,000 papers published in the journal so far, one realizes how vegetation science has changed over the past three decades. As in any area of science, some topics are becoming out of fashion, others have become hot and intensively studied, while new topics are just appearing on the horizon. Since its foundation, the journal was led by several Chief Editors. As all the submitted papers went through their hands, the Chief Editors became familiar with the spectrum of topics across the whole field of vegetation science and changes of this spectrum over time. This experience can help identify the main trends in our field in the recent past, and possibly also identify the most promising trends for the near future. Therefore, the current four Chief Editors opened a discussion in which they also involved the past Chief Editors. We focused this discussion on the following two questions: (a) Which were the most significant developments in vegetation science over the past 30 years? (b) What can we expect to be the most important developments in vegetation science in the next 10 years? Different developments were highlighted in this discussion, but in the end, we converged on some topics that we considered as the main recent trends and the likely main future perspectives for vegetation science. The topics presented in the next two sections reflect the collective opinions of the four current Chief Editors (MC, AC, MP, VDP) and four past Chief Editors who actively participated in the discussion (JPB, LM, RKP, PSW). Approximately at the same time as JVS was founded, personal computers became widely available for every-day use by vegetation scientists. This major technological breakthrough predestined the development of large databases of vegetation-plot records, plant traits, phylogenies, plant distributions, and spatially explicit environmental data, including those obtained from remote sensing. Simultaneously, almost exponential development of new analytical methods and the proliferation of computer codes to exploit these methods took off. Machine-learning methods revolutionized data analysis, becoming an alternative to traditional statistics. Introduction of geographic information systems opened new perspectives by adding spatial context to vegetation analyses. These methodological advances, which are indeed not specific to vegetation science, have forever changed the methodological toolkit we are using. They also considerably extended the range of questions we can ask, including those about patterns and processes over large spatial extents, creating a new interface between vegetation science and macroecology. Actually, this development of ecoinformatics has contributed significantly to all the developments mentioned below. Vegetation science has been steadily expanding beyond the species level to explore the application of plant traits for understanding assembly and dynamics of plant communities. Traits not only influence how plants interact with their environment; they also influence how they interact with other organisms, such as pollinators, herbivores or symbiotic fungi and bacteria. Thus, they link plant communities with other trophic levels of the ecosystem. The interest in traits has also drawn the attention of vegetation scientists to the thus far poorly studied “invisible” parts of plant communities: roots and other belowground organs, and seed banks. Including functional traits in our analyses at the community level is essential for solving various environmental issues, and vegetation scientists are increasingly recognized as important partners in inter