Earlier this year Journal of Applied Ecology held an open recruitment process for new Associate Editors to apply to join the Editorial board. We received a very positive response to this initiative, with nearly 100 applications from ecologists interested in engaging with the Journal.  It was great to see such enthusiasm from potential Associate Editors and the quality of the applications was very impressive, which meant we had many hard decisions to make.

In total, we recruited 24 new Associate Editors, who will expand the range and diversity of the editorial board. The full list of new Associate Editors and their research interests are listed below.

As well, as welcoming these new Associate Editors, we are also, very sadly, saying goodbye to several long-standing Associate Editors, who have collectively provided over 100-years service to the journal. They are Shelley Arnott, Queens University, Canada; Christopher Baraloto, Florida International University, USA; Paulo Brando, Amazon Environmental Research Institute, Brazil; Harald Bugmann, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland; Guillaume Chapron, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden; Yann Clough, Lund University, Germany; Vincent Devictor, Institute of Evolutionary Sciences of Montpellier, France; Esteban Fernandez-Juricic, Purdue University, USA; John Finn, Teagasc, Ireland; Chris Frid, University of Liverpool, UK; Julia Jones, Bangor University, UK; David Kleijn, Wageningen University, The Netherlands; Henrik Österblom, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden; Quentin Paynter, Landcare Research Ltd, New Zealand; Navinder Singh, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden; Shiqiang Wan, Henan University, China and Jeremy Wilson, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, UK.

We are hugely grateful to these Associate Editors, who have very kindly volunteered their time to the journal over the past years. They have played a crucial role in contributing to the success of the journal. We would like to take this opportunity to thank these Associate Editors for the dedication, support and hard work they have provided to the journal and we wish them all the very best for their future endeavours.

Being an Associate Editor can be a valuable, interesting and fun experience. We are hugely thankful to everyone who volunteers their time to Journal of Applied Ecology and we hope our new Associate Editors will enjoy this experience. Our new Associate Editors are:

Robert Arlinghaus
Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries & Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
Robert is an interdisciplinary fisheries professor interested in the interactions of humans and aquatic ecosystems. He mainly studies recreational fisheries as complex adaptive systems using a range of methods and approaches spanning the social and biological and evolutionary sciences such as survey-based human dimension studies, institutional analysis, fish population dynamics and experimental evolution mimicking harvesting pressure.

Rob Britton
Bournemouth University, UK
Rob’s research interests include biological invasions, the response of species to climate change and the conservation ecology of threatened species. His focus is on studying freshwater ecology and especially fish. He studies aspects including responses of life history traits, trophic ecology (using stable isotopes) and movement patterns to environmental change and is particularly interested in how populations and communities respond to the management of invasive species. He has previously worked as a scientist for a governmental agency in England and so has strong appreciation of how practitioners should apply ecological research in their work.

Nathalie Butt
University of Queensland, Australia
Nathalie is an Australian research Council Fellow at the University of Queensland. Her work is concerned with the interactions between biodiversity and climate/climate change, previously focussing on forests in tropical South America, temperate Europe, south western USA and Australian eucalypt ecosystems. She works on multi-scale analyses of climate and human impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem function and processes, and species’ and ecosystem vulnerability to climate change.

Lei Cheng
Zhejiang University, China
Lei is interested in understanding the underlying mechanisms by which climate change factors affect the functioning and structure of terrestrial ecosystems. By combining molecular, genomic and ecological tools, he seeks to understand how microbes regulate carbon and nutrient cycling in soil and water.

Pieter De Frenne
Ghent University, Belgium
Pieter’s research interests are climate change, global change ecology, general and applied botany, (agro)biodiversity and seed ecology from the individual to the ecosystem level. He is particularly interested in the effects of global change (climate change, land-use change, pollution, invasive species) on plants in ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, alpine meadows and agroecosystems. To answer questions in connection to plant population biology, botany and ecology and global change themes, he uses observational studies, experimental approaches, large databases and modelling.

Bret Elderd
Louisiana State University, USA
Bret’s research examines how population dynamics are affected by changes in community structure, climate, and environmental variation. In his work, he combines models with experimental or historical data to understand what drives population trajectories with an emphasis on disease and population ecology. A large portion of Bret’s work examines how abiotic and biotic factors influence the interaction between insect hosts and their pathogens. In general, he is interested in exploring questions related to population dynamics and, then, using the results to ask applied questions relevant to land managers as well as public health officials.

Alex Fajardo
Centro de Investigación en Ecosistemas de la Patagonia (CIEP), Chile
Alex is a forest ecologist settled in the Chilean Patagonia. His particular interests are in plant-plant interactions and their application in restoration; plant invasion; land-use change and the shifting in ecosystem functioning and services; treeline dynamics and climate change.  In general, his motto is to generate knowledge about ecological processes in plants in order to make a better use and conservation of species and ecosystems in southern South America.

Cristina Garcia
CIBIO/InBIO, Portugal
Cristina’s research interests focus on investigating the chances of remnant forest patches to persist and expand across managed landscapes. She studies the role of dispersal mutualisms in determining the colonisation success of expanded forests and in shaping the spatial distribution of genetic diversity through the movement of pollen and seeds and the genes they encapsulate. She is also interested in applying novel techniques to quantify long distance dispersal events, such as statistics of extremes, and in using integrated eco-evolutionary approaches to understand the outcomes of plant dispersal.

Lucas Garibaldi
Universidad Nacional de Río Negro & CONICET, Argentina
Lucas has a PhD in Agronomy with a special interest in achieving ecological, economical, and social sustainability in agricultural and forestry systems. His areas of interest are agroecology, ecosystem services, socio-economic valuation, plant-insect interactions, ecological intensification and biodiversity. He has taught since he was 18 years old, nowadays on several courses on statistical modelling.

Hedley Grantham
Wildlife Conservation Society, Australia
Hedley’s main focus is on supporting biodiversity conservation and sustainable development planning at the landscape and seascape scale. He is a specialist on designing and integrating multidisciplinary science and priority setting analysis to support planning and decision-making processes. He also works on development planning including how to improve siting of impacts, and better application of the mitigation hierarchy including the design of biodiversity offsets. His experience includes working alongside NGO’s, governments, development banks, communities and with other in the private sector.

Marney Isaac
University of Toronto, Canada
Marney conducts research on the ecological, biophysical, and social dimension of agroecosystems. She studies nutrient cycles, plant functional traits and plant-soil interactions in biologically complex agricultural systems, with a particular attention on identifying strategies for ecosystem services and sustainable livelihoods. She also supervises a research program investigating agrarian management networks and innovation in agroecology.

Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley
Paul Sabatier University, France
Stephanie is motivated to solve pressing global conservation problems. She grew up in Michigan, USA, near the shores of Lake Michigan, and studied the lands and waters there until 2006. As a dedicated researcher and educator, over the last decade she has travelled the world conducting scientific research to improve our understanding about the conservation of freshwater ecosystems, and about the relationships between humans and nature. She communicates and shares stories about science, conservation and nature through art and writing. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher evaluating how dams, weirs and roads impact freshwater fish distribution and community composition.

Cate Macinnis-Ng
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Cate is interested in plant responses to environmental conditions, including seasonal cycles in climate and responses to extreme events. She has worked on native forests, savannas, woodlands, plantations and even seagrasses using measurement and modelling approaches. Cate is a current Rutherford Discovery Fellow and is running the kauri drought experiment, a field-based assessment of drought impacts on New Zealand’s iconic native forest.

Ainhoa Magrach
Estacion Biologica de Doñana, Spain
Ainhoa is an ecologist with a research emphasis on global change impacts to community composition and structure, particularly concentrating on species interactions and how they regulate biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Her research aims at tackling applied ecology questions but with a solid theoretical and basic research background. Her ultimate goal is to understand the effects of ecosystem degradation on functionality while finding ways to align economic development with biodiversity conservation within human-dominated landscapes across both temperate and tropical systems. She uses plant-pollinator interactions as study systems and the pollination service they provide to both wild and managed plants (crops).

Martine Maron
University of Queensland, Australia
Martine’s expertise is in environmental policy and ecology. Her current research includes exploring the consequences (both intended and unintended) of different biodiversity offsetting approaches, as well as examining the risks and consequences of the introduction of offsetting into the conservation policy mix at national and international levels. Her research group also works on interspecific competition and woodland bird ecology, drivers of landscape-level species richness, resource distribution and persistence of bird species in patchy landscapes, and the influence of climate change on species persistence.

David Moreno Mateos
BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change, Spain
David studies ecosystem recovery after anthropogenic disturbances with especial emphasis on wetlands and forests. His aim is to understand patterns of recovery of complex ecosystem attributes (e.g. stability) emerging from organism interactions. He uses empirical field-collected data and meta-analyses to understand and accelerate the processes of ecosystem recovery in the context of restoration.

Elizabeth Nichols
Swarthmore College, USA
Liz is a community ecologist who studies biodiversity response to anthropogenic global change drivers, at scales from the individual to the biome. In particular, she is interested in understanding the influence of landscape structure on biodiversity, species interactions, ecosystem service production, and environmental sustainability.

Kechang Niu
Nanjing University, China
Kechang’s research focuses mainly on plant ecology in alpine grassland, community assembly and ecosystem functioning. He is particularly interested in how land use affects the functional composition of plant communities through change in environmental factors and biological interactions. His research frequently involves functional traits to predict community processes and ecosystem functioning following environmental changes. He has a long-standing interest in ecological interactions among plants, herbivory, soils and microbes and their consequences on community assembly and ecosystem services.

Aníbal Pauchard
University of Concepción, Chile
Aníbal’s research focus is the ecology of biological invasions and their impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. By using multi-scale approaches, based on observations and field experiments, he has studied the synergies of drivers of global change and invasions in mountains. He is interested in broader issues in ecology, conservation and the management of natural resources.

Romina Rader
University of New England, Australia
Romina is a researcher with expertise in pollination and landscape ecology. Her research concerns the identity and performance of wild insect pollinators in crops, plant–animal interactions in natural and human-modified landscapes, plant and animal responses to changes in landscape structure and land management, and the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services. She generally works across a broad range of habitats including remnant vegetation, orchards, dairy farms and arable crops and is currently working on several projects both in Australia and various countries abroad.

Inderjit Singh
University of Delhi, India
The aim of Inderjit’s research is to understand the drivers/mechanisms underpinning ecological and evolutionary processes through which: 1) naturalized and/or nonnative plants, achieve ecological success and influence native biodiversity or 2) native plants continue to thrive in a changing global environment. His current work is focused on unraveling ecological-evolutionary processes that could lead to discovery of new mechanisms or new pathways that facilitate invasion of a species in novel environments. He has led productive collaborations in North America, South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia to study the invasion of some of the world’s most aggressive plant invaders including Acacia dealbata, Prosopis juliflora, Ageratina adenophora or Eucalyptus globulus. Inderjit has provided a rigorous evidence of the allelochemical hypothesis in the competitive or invasive success of naturalized and or non-native invasive species over a range of abiotic and biotic conditions.

Izak Smit
South African National Parks, South Africa
As a scientist in a conservation agency, Izak is aware of the importance of relevant, practical and scientifically robust research for informing conservation management. He sometimes describes his job as a “translator” – translating management concerns into research frameworks and questions, and translating research results into management implications and actions. Izak is particularly interested in studying large-scale spatio-temporal ecological patterns and the underlying causes and effects thereof, and whether the drivers of these patterns are natural or management induced.

Margaret Stanley
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Much of Margaret’s research is applied, and aims to understand and mitigate the impacts of people on biodiversity. Her interests in terrestrial ecology are diverse (in terms of taxa and research area), but can be grouped into three main research strands: invasion ecology; urban ecology; and plant-animal interactions (seed dispersal, herbivory and pollination).

Rafael Zenni
Federal University of Lavras, Brazil
Rafael is an ecologist interested in invasion biology and conservation. His research focus on ecological and evolutionary mechanisms related to the contraction, expansion, and maintenance of species ranges in scales that vary from genes to global trade. He aims to understand how non-native species naturalize in new habitats, why some populations of non-native species are able to rapidly expand into their new ranges while others are not, how we can exclude, control, or eradicate invasive non-native species, and how organisms are responding to the global climatic changes.