Justification

For over three decades, the Clonal Plant Workshops have gathered researchers from around the world every two to three years in countries in Europe, North America, and Asia to discuss and exchange ideas and findings on clonality, one of the most remarkable and distinguishing properties of plants. Each of these workshops has resulted in a book or a special feature or issue of a journal. The journals have included Oikos, Plant Ecology, Evolutionary Ecology, Annals of Botany, and Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

The ¹⁴th Clonal Plant Workshop was held in Taizhou, Zhejiang, China, on October 18-22, 2024. The theme for this workshop was “Clonal Plants as Agents of Change”, focusing on how clonality shapes the composition and dynamics of communities and ecosystems, underlies biological invasions, can be enlisted in ecological restoration, and interacts with global change. The workshop featured keynote presentations by well-known ecologists who have worked extensively on clonality and also by researchers who do not focus on clonality but bring new ideas to the field.

We propose to assemble a set of papers based on the workshop as a special issue or feature in the Journal of Plant Ecology and would be glad to act as guest editors. If the journal agrees, we will organize a set of five to seven invited papers by specific authors and call for contributed papers by the other participants in the workshop. We anticipate that the total number of acceptable papers will be between 15 and 25. We believe that this special issue will interest plant ecologists in many countries.

Contents and Main Goals

The special issue will be designed to provide a forum for contributions that address the roles of clonality in ecology and especially the role of clonal plants as causes of change. For example, papers will address how clonality shapes the composition and dynamics of communities and ecosystems, underlies biological invasions, can be enlisted in ecological restoration, and interacts with global change.

Guest Editors

Prof. Fei-Hai Yu
Institute of Wetland & Clone Ecology
Taizhou University
China
feihaiyu@126.com

Prof. Peter Alpert
Department of Biology
University of Massachusetts, Amherst; University of California, Berkeley
USA
palpert@umass.edu

Prof. Jitka Klimešová
Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Charles University
Czech Republic
Jitka.Klimesova@ibot.cas.cz

Schedule

We are seeking to publish papers in a timely fashion while providing sufficient lead time for manuscript preparation. To this end, we propose the following deadlines:

Title submission: December 15, 2024

Abstract submission: March 15, 2025

Manuscript submission: June 15, 2025

Manuscript Reviews: August 15, 2025

Revised manuscripts: September 15, 2025

Release: December 15, 2025

Submission

All papers must conform to the JPE’s submission guidelines and be submitted via the online submission system.

NOTE: Please kindly select the special issue "Clonal Plants as Agents of Change" during the submission process and make a mention of it in the cover letter.