AoB PLANTS is soliciting submissions for an upcoming Special Issue to be published in 2014 titled ‘Scaling Effects Regulating Plant Response to Global Change.’  AoB PLANTS is an open-access, nonprofit journal established in 2010, published by Oxford University Press (http://aobplants.oxfordjournals.org), and indexed in Web of Science.  The journal is growing rapidly and is intensifying its focus on environmental biology.  Its first Impact Factor score will be released in June.  

Edited by Elise Gornish (University of California, Davis) and Sebastian Leuzinger (Auckland University of Technology), this Special Issue will focus on the relationship between plant responses to global change and scale.  A growing number of studies suggest that the responses of plants to various forms of climate change frequently vary substantially with the temporal and spatial scale of the study.  Prominent examples include changes in effect size or even reversals in sign as experiments continue over many years or decades.  Similarly, the effect sizes of climate-change studies often decrease with increasing level of organization (e.g., from leaf to tree).  There is an urgent need to synthesize this complexity and to quantify effect sizes and over-arching trends that are emerging across large spatial, temporal and organizational dimensions.  This special issue will offer a broad perspective on global-change research, dealing with effect sizes across ecosystems, temporal and spatial scales, and organizational levels.  

The following papers are scheduled for inclusion in this Special Issue, and many others will be added in the coming weeks:

Elise Gornish (University of California, Davis) & Sebastian Leuzinger (Auckland University of Technology)
‘Interactive effects of global change and invasion across levels of organization in an old-field plant community’

Adam Langley (Villanova University) & Bruce Hungate (Northern Arizona University)
‘The consequences of tradeoffs in plant responses to different global change drivers'

Thomas E. Miller, Will Ryan, Robert Ellis, and Abigail Pastore (Florida State University)
‘The relationship between dynamic geomorphology and vegetation across spatial scales in coastal dune systems’

Stan Schymanski (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Michael Roderick (Australian National University) & Murugesu Sivapalan (University of Illinois)
'Predicting long-term responses of vegetation water use to elevated atmospheric CO2'

If you are interested in submitting a paper for inclusion in this Special Issue, please send details to Guest Editor Elise Gornish ([log in to unmask]) and the Chief Editor of AoB PLANTS, Hall Cushman ([log in to unmask]).  

Papers submitted to AoB PLANTS undergo double-blind peer evaluation and receive first decisions quickly (typically within 30–40 days of submission).  Additionally, all open-access fees for AoB PLANTS have been waived until 2015.