Journal of Plant Ecology (JPE) is a bi-monthly, peer-reviewed international journal of plant ecology, which serves as an important medium for Chinese and international ecologists to present research findings and discuss challenging issues in the broad field of plants and their interactions with their biotic and abiotic environment.

Original research articles, reviews (published under full open access), perspectives, data papers and short communications published in JPE will cover all aspects of plant ecology, including plant ecophysiology, population ecology, community ecology, ecosystem ecology and landscape ecology as well as conservation ecology, evolutionary ecology and theoretical ecology. JPE includes special issues/features focusing on frontiers in plant ecology (including global change, invasive species, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, etc.), which may include reviews written by the leading ecologists in the field.

JPE is sponsored by the Botanical Society of China and the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published by Oxford University Press.

Thank you for your interest in Journal of Plant Ecology. Please read the complete Instructions to Authorscarefully prior to submission, including the section on copyright. To ensure fast peer review and publication, manuscripts that do not adhere to the following instructions will be returned to the corresponding author for technical revision before undergoing peer review.

JPE recognizes that excellent manuscripts may have been erroneously rejected by other journals. Authors are encouraged to submit such manuscripts, together with the reviews from previous peer review and an explanation in the cover letter of how the review comments have been incorporated in the submitted version of the manuscript. Such manuscripts will be assessed based on the previous reviews and a decision may be taken by the editor-in-chief without further review.

JPE welcomes seven main types of manuscripts that are subjected to online peer review:

Some other types of manuscripts, e.g. Meeting Reports or Editorials, are usually commissioned, but suggestions may also be submitted for the editors' consideration. These papers, classified as “Editorial Materials”, do not contain primary research data and thus do not undergo peer review.

Original manuscripts must be provided as Microsoft Word. References, Figure Legends and Tables should be included in the Word file. The main text should be typewritten using size 12 Times New Roman on one side only of A4 size, aligned left and double-spaced with margins of at least 3 cm. All pages should be numbered sequentially. Each line of the text should also be numbered consecutively. Manuscripts should be written in clear, concise and scientific language, nomenclature and standard international units should be used. Authors are advised to follow the JPE style carefully (see the sample copy for format). Manuscripts that do not meet these standards will be returned to authors without reviewing.

Please organize your manuscripts in the following order:

The title page should contain:

(a) the title (not exceeding 100 characters) 
(b) the name(s) of the author(s) 
(c) the name(s) and address(es) of the institution(s) where the work was carried out, followed by the contact details of the author to whom correspondence should be sent (address, telephone, fax, and e-mail).

Any acknowledgements or any footnotes referring to the title, including sources of financial support, should be inserted into the Acknowledgements section, which precedes the References. Authors should also supply a running title which will appear at the top of the page, this should not exceed 50 characters, including spaces.

All research articles should have a brief abstract that states the purpose(s), methods, main findings and principal conclusions of the study. Review articles should also have an abstract describing the content concisely. The abstract length should be 250 words or fewer. The abstract does not need to be structured. Five to seven key words should be supplied after the abstract for indexing purposes.

You will be required to upload the title, abstract and keywords of your article translated in Chinese in a separate word file after your manuscript is accepted if one of your co-authors is a Chinese. Please ignore this if there is no Chinese co-author, and our Editorial Board will help. OUP will present the Chinese abstract in the platform as well as in the PDF to better disseminate your research in China. (upload through First Look process after the manuscript is accepted; an email will be sent in due course)

The body of the text should be subdivided into the following main headings:

(a) Introduction should be concise and define the scope of the work in relation to other work done in the same field.
(b) Materials and methods should be brief but informative enough for reproduction of the work; when methods published in standard journals are followed without any modification, a reference to the work should be listed.
(c) Results and Discussion should be presented with clarity and precision.

This section should list funding sources. The following rules should be followed:

(a) The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
(b) The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health’ or simply 'National Institutes of Health' not ‘NCI' (one of the 27 subinstitutions) or 'NCI at NIH’ – see the full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies for details
(c) Grant numbers should be complete and accurate and provided in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number ABX CDXXXXXX]’
(d) Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers ABX CDXXXXXX, EFX GHXXXXXX]’
(e) Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
(f) Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.

An example is given here: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [P50 CA098252 and CA118790 to R.B.S.R.] and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [HFY GR667789].

Oxford Journals will deposit all NIH-funded articles in PubMed Central. See Depositing articles in repositories – information for authors for details. Authors must ensure that manuscripts are clearly indicated as NIH-funded using the guidelines above.

This section may acknowledge contributions from non-authors, and it should include a statement of any conflicts of interest. Amendments or corrections are not allowed after publication.

We highly recommend the use of a reference software such as EndNote for reference management and formatting (click to download the JPE Endnote reference style file).

For review articles, there is no limitation on the number of references cited, although we strongly suggest citing only publications in which original knowledge was presented. For other types of articles, the maximum number of cited references is 50.

All references in the text should have the authors immediately followed by the date to facilitate the electronic linkages which are available on-line, for example: (Shen and Ma 2001) or Shen and Ma (2001). If several papers by the same author in the same year are cited, they should be lettered in sequence (2000a, 2000b), etc. When papers are by more than two authors they should be cited thus: (Shen et al. 2001).

Only papers published or in press should be cited in the literature list. Unpublished results, including submitted manuscripts and those in preparation, should be cited as unpublished in the text. Citation of articles from e-journals and journal articles published ahead of print should have the author names, year, title, journal title followed by the assigned digital object identifier (DOI). All citations mentioned in the text, tables or figures must be listed in the reference list

Names of journals should be abbreviated according to the Serial Sources for the Biosis Data Base, available in most libraries or from http://www.biosis.org. The list of reference must be typed double-spaced throughout and checked thoroughly before submission. If the list is not in the correct form it will be returned to the author for amendment and publication of the paper may be delayed.

Journals:

Kennedy T, Jones R (1985) Effect of obesity on esophageal transit. Am J Surg 149:177–81.

Chen MJ, Fu YW, Zhou QY, et al. (2015) Simulation of Cd2+ and Zn2+ migration among water, soil and Paspalum distichum. Environ Sci Technol 38:65–70.

Book:

Long HC, Blatt MA, Higgins MC, et al. (1997) Medical Decision Making. Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Chapter in book:

Manners T, Jones R, Riley M (1997) Relationship of overweight to haitus hernia and reflux oesophagitis. In Newman W (ed). The Obesity Conundrum. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science, 352–74.

Articles published online but not yet in print:

Qiao D, Chen W, Stratagoules E, et al. (2000) Bile acid-induced activation of activator protein-1 requires both extracellular signal-regulated kinase and protein kinase C signaling. J Biol Chem, doi:10.1074/jbc.M908890199.

Conference proceedings:

Hou Y, Qiu Y, Vo NH, et al. (2003) 23-O derivatives of OMT: highly active against H. influenzae. In: Programs and Abstracts of the Forty-third Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Chicago, IL. Abstract F-1187, p.242. American Society for Microbiology, Washington, DC.

Thesis:

N'tchobo H (1998) Sucrose unloading in tomato fruits. II. Subcellular distribution of acid invertase and possible roles in sucrose turnover and hexose storage in tomato fruit. PhD thesis. Laval University, Canada.

Tables should be self-contained and complement, but not duplicate information in the text. Tables should be on a separate page, and should be numbered in Arabic numerals with an appropriate legend at the head. All tables should have three horizontal lines, with the upper and the lower lines in bold. No vertical lines are allowed (see the sample copy for format). They should be included in the text file (in the Word file).

Figures should be self-explanatory and contain as much information as is consistent with clarity. All figures must carry the figure number in Arabic numerals. Citation in the text should take the form Fig. 1a etc. The minimum resolution for the figures is 300 dpi (dots per inch) for tone or colour, 1200 dpi for line art at approximately the correct size for publication. Colour figures should be CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black). All figures must be supplied in electronic format as .TIF.

Line drawings should be clear: faint shading or stippling will be lost upon reproduction and should be avoided and heavy shading or stippling may appear black. Lines and symbols should be drawn boldly enough to stand reduction to the desired size. For graphs where reduction to one-half in linear dimensions is intended, a suitable thickness for the axis would be 0.3 mm and for the other lines 0.4 or 1.0 mm depending on the complexity of the graph.

The preferred symbols are closed circle, open circle, closed square, open square, closed triangle, and open triangle and should be no smaller than 2 mm (height/diameter) for reduction to one-half. The symbols x and + should be avoided.

Photographs not supplied electronically, must be of high quality, printed on glossy paper and mounted neatly on a thin white card base, leaving a narrow gap between each print. Irregular and asymmetrically distributed groups of photographs will not be accepted. Individual figures should be lettered, a, b, c, etc. on the photograph using a lettering set. Other lettering, arrows, etc. may be put on the photograph by the author; otherwise they should be indicated in the exact position required on a transparent or translucent self-locating overlay. On no account should any marks be made on the photograph itself.

Colour figures: There is no cost for the reproduction of colour figures in JPE now. Colour plates should be combined to make a single composite figure whenever possible. A scale should be included; otherwise the scale of the original should be stated in the legends so that the final scale can be calculated.

Legends: A separate typewritten, double-spaced list of legends of all figures must be supplied and included in the text file. Each legend should contain sufficient explanation to be meaningful without cross-referencing. A scale of the original should be included in the legend unless already indicated in the picture. A description of the symbols used in the figures should be written out in full. (Please do not include the character symbol in the legend.)

Please be aware that figure legends may be used by search engines for figure searches.

Figure font requirements: Typeface: Arial Figure labels (a, b, c, etc.) font size: 12 pt, bold Figure caption font size: 12 pt, no bold X-axis, y-axis labels font size: 12 pt, no bold X-axis, y-axis units: 10 pt, no bold All other text inside figures: 10 pt, no bold

See the OUP website for more figure instruction for OUP Journals.

Cover illustrations will be taken from, or be associated with, an article that appears in the journal, where possible. Authors wishing to submit a potential cover illustration should indicate it at the time of submission. The potential cover illustration figures must be supplied in electronic format as .TIF, and resolution must be above 300 dpi at publication size. Please supply a short concise caption to appear inside the journal.

For useful information on preparing your figures for publication, go to http://cpc.cadmus.com/da. Please note that all labels used in figures should be in lower case in both the figure and the legend. The journal reserves the right to reduce the size of illustrative material. All micrographs must carry a magnification bar.

There are facilities for publishing data on the Internet (e.g. appendices, additional tables, graphics and other material useful for enhancing the understanding of the manuscript) as supplementary data. This section should include all the legends of the supplementary materials.

Authors are encouraged to submit a graphical abstract as part of the article, in addition to the text abstract. The graphical abstract should clearly summarize the focus and findings of the article, and will be published as part of the article online and in PDF. The graphical abstract should be submitted for peer review as a separate file, selecting the appropriate file-type designation in the journal’s online submission system. The file should be clearly named, e.g. graphical_abstract.tiff. See this page for guidance on appropriate file format and resolution for graphics. Please ensure graphical abstracts are in landscape format.

Note that graphical abstracts will be subject to any print reproduction charges that the journal levies for colour figures.

Manuscripts should be submitted via the web-based submission system.

Please also include the names of 3–5 individuals that are qualified to review your manuscript. Indicate the name, institution and email address of each individual. We will try to have at least one reviewer from the set that you have requested. You may also request a member of the editorial team that you think is best suited to handle your manuscript.

All authors must include a cover letter when submitting a manuscript to JPE. Cover letters should include the following sections:

(a) Title, names of authors, and numbers of tables, figures and pages in the main text, and supplementary materials;
(b) The importance and novelty of the research findings in the study;
(c) Authors need to promise that manuscripts submitted to JPE are considered on the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere, nor are under consideration for publication;
(d) In addition, agreement for submission and email address from all the authors are needed; (e) Contact information of at least the corresponding author is needed (better a phone number should be included).

Particularly if English is not your first language, before submitting your manuscript you may wish to have it edited for language. This is not a mandatory step, but may help to ensure that the academic content of your paper is fully understood by journal editors and reviewers. Language editing does not guarantee that your manuscript will be accepted for publication. For further information on this service, please click here.

Revised manuscripts should be returned via the online submission system within three months (major revision) or one month (minor revision) of the date from when the invitation was sent; revised manuscripts received after this time will be considered as new submissions. Revised manuscripts should be accompanied by a detailed response letter on how all the concerns of the editor and referees have been addressed. Please give the exact page number(s), paragraphs(s) and line number(s) where each revision was made. Please copy this letter in “Response to reviews” during submission and as well as upload a word file of your response.

Format: Original source files are required to avoid delays if the manuscript is accepted. The main text must be provided as Microsoft Word. All the changes should be highlighted (in red colour or with track changes using the “revision mode” in Microsoft Word). References, Figure Legends and Tables should be included in the Word file.

Figures should be provided as .TIF files. The minimum resolution for the figures is 300 dpi for tone or colour, 1200 dpi for line art at approximately the correct size for publication. Colour figures should be CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black).

Supplementary data may be submitted for online only publication if it adds value for potential readers. The hard copy of the manuscript should stand alone, but it should be indicated at an appropriate point in the text that supplementary material is available on-line. Please name your supplementary material and cite it within the manuscript as Figure S1, Table S1, Video S1, etc, and provide a detailed legend.

Electronic files of supplementary material are preferable as one complete .PDF file. If images are supplied as .GIFs or .JPEGs, the minimum acceptable resolution for viewing on screen is 120 dpi.

Videos: The preferred formats for video clips are .MOV, .MPG, .AVI, and animated .GIF files. Authors are advised to use a readily available program to create movies so that they can be viewed easily with e.g., Windows Media Player or QuickTime.

Authors should carefully check the supplementary data as this information is not professionally copy edited or proofread. Once the manuscript is accepted and has been sent to production, Authors are no longer allowed to revise the supplementary materials, including at the proof stage.

Standard chemical symbols may be used in the text where desirable in the interests of conciseness. For long chemical names and other cumbersome terms, widely accepted abbreviations may be used in the text (e.g. ATP, DNA); the list of standard abbreviations published by The Biochemical Journal(http://www.biochemj.org/bj/bji2a.htm) is an acceptable guide. Abbreviations for the names of less common compounds may be used, but the full term should be given on first mention. It is confusing and unnecessary to use abbreviations for common English words (e.g. L for light).

The complete scientific name (genus, species, and authority, and cultivar where appropriate) must be cited for every organism at the first mention. The generic name may be abbreviated to the initial thereafter except where intervening references to other genera with the same initial could cause confusion. If vernacular names are employed, they must be accompanied by the correct scientific name on first use.

Follow Chemical Abstracts and its indexes for chemical names. The IUPAC and IUBMB recommendations on chemical, biochemical, and molecular biology nomenclature should be followed (see IUPAC and IUBMB).

The metric system is adopted as standard. The system of units known as 'SI' should be used. If non-standard abbreviations must be used they should be defined in the text. Units of measurement should be spelled out except when preceded by a numeral, when they should be abbreviated in the standard form: g, mg, cm3, etc. and not followed by full stops. Use negative exponents to indicate units in the denominator (i.e. mmol m-2 s-1).

Numbers up to ten should be spelled out in the text except when referring to measurements. Numbers higher than ten are to be represented as numerals except at the beginning of a sentence. Fractions are to be expressed as decimals.

Dates should be cited thus: 7 June 2001 and the 24 hour clock should be used.

Deposition of amino acid sequences of proteins or nucleotide sequences is required before publication, and the database accession number must be given in the text of the manuscript. Microarray Gene Expression Data should comply with the minimum information about microarray experiments standard (visit MIAME for more information.)

If equations require more than one level of subscript or superscript, please use either 'Microsoft Equation Editor' or 'Math Type'. If anything else is used, the equation has to be re-typed which makes it vulnerable to errors.

Please note that if your manuscript includes any data in tables or figure(s) modified or re-drawn from another publication, you will need permission from the original publisher to reproduce it before your manuscript can be published. This includes figures adapted in any way from other publications. Permission to reproduce figures or data from other publications must be sought by authors at the time of acceptance. Please note that obtaining copyright permission could take some time. A copy of the permission document should be sent to the Production Editor, Journal of Plant Ecology, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP. Email: jpe@oup.com.

To seek copyright permission please contact the copyright permission department of the relevant journal/publisher.

Proofs will be sent electronically to the corresponding author as a .PDF file. The author should reply to the proof email with their corrections, and should send an annotated PDF. Corrections should be limited to typographical errors and corrections should be returned within three days of receipt; otherwise the Editor reserves the right to correct the proofs and to send the material for publication. This is essential if all the material in a given issue is not to be delayed by the late receipt of one corrected proof.

Manuscripts that are more than ten pages in length when typeset will incur a charge of £120/$192/€156 per extra page after the tenth page. The first ten pages are free of charge.

On publication of an article, the corresponding author will receive a unique URL that gives access to both PDF and HTML versions of the paper. The URL links visitors to the JPE site and the complete version of the paper online with all functionality retained is accessible regardless of subscription status.

If you would like to subscribe in print, please contact the JPE editorial office (jpe@ibcas.ac.cn).

It is a condition of publication in the journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) and the Botanical Society of China (BSC). This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. In assigning the licence, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) and the Botanical Society of China (BSC), is notified in writing and in advance.

Upon receipt of accepted manuscripts at Oxford Journals authors will be invited to complete an online copyright licence to publish form.

Please note that by submitting an article for publication you confirm that you are the corresponding/submitting author and that Oxford University Press ("OUP") may retain your email address for the purpose of communicating with you about the article. You agree to notify OUP immediately if your details change. If your article is accepted for publication OUP will contact you using the email address you have used in the registration process. Please note that OUP does not retain copies of rejected articles.

Oxford Open articles are published under Creative Commons licences. Authors publishing in Journal of Plant Ecology can use the following Creative Commons licences for their articles:

Find out more about the Creative Commons licences.

For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Journal policy also requires that all authors sign a conflict of interest statement. If the manuscript is published, such information may be communicated in a note following the text and reference.

Journal of Plant Ecology is a fully open access (OA) journal, all papers will be charged OA fee once accepted, for both CC BY and CC BY-NC licences, at the rate of $2085.

Please see here for more information about the Creative Commons licences.

OUP has a growing number of Read and Publish agreements with institutions and consortia which provide funding for open access publishing. This means authors from participating institutions can publish open access, and the institution may pay the charge. 

Find out if your institution is participating.

For more details about the OA charge discount and waive policy, please contact the Editorial Office at jpe@ibcas.ac.cn.

If you will be publishing your paper under an Open Access licence but it contains material for which you do nothave Open Access re-use permissions, please state this clearly by supplying the following credit line alongside the material:

Title of content Author, Original publication, year of original publication, by permission of [rights holder] This image/content is not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons licence of this publication. For permission to reuse, please contact the rights holder

In order to meet your funding requirements authors are required to name their funding sources, or state if there are none, during the submission process. Visit CHORUS for more information on this process and the CHORUS initiative.

JPE is published on a bi-monthly basis. To subscribe or to order a single copy of the journal, please contact the editorial office at jpe@ibcas.ac.cn. The cost per issue is ¥150, or ¥900 for an annual subscription. Make sure to inform us if you wish to receive a specific issue or a full subscription. The editorial office will contact you within several days to arrange for payment.

Where ethically feasible, JPE strongly encourages authors to make all data and software code on which the conclusions of the paper rely available to readers. We suggest that data be presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files, or deposited in a public repository whenever possible, such as ScienceDB, Dryad, your own institutional or funder repository, or as Supplementary Material on JPE website. For information on general repositories for all data types, and a list of recommended repositories by subject area, please see Choosing where to archive your data.

JPE supports the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and requires that all publicly available datasets be fully referenced in the reference list with an accession number or unique identifier such as a digital object identifier (DOI). Data citations should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite:

*The inclusion of the [dataset] tag at the beginning of the citation helps us to correctly identify and tag the citation. This tag will be removed from the citation published in the reference list.

Authors retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (preprint) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the journal. For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies. If accepted, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

JPE Editorial Office
Add: Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences
No. 20 Nanxincun, Xiangshan, Beijing 100093, China
Tel: +86-10-62836667; E-mail: jpe@ibcas.ac.cn
For pre-submission inquiries, e-mail: jpe@ibcas.ac.cn
or assistance with online submission, e-mail: jpe@ibcas.ac.cn
For status inquiries about submitted papers, e-mail: jpe@ibcas.ac.cn
For production queries, including proofs, e-mail: jpe@oup.com
For queries regarding permissions, e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com