Ecology Letters

A flagship journal and how it is run

John M. Drake

Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia · Senior Editor, Ecology Letters

Ecological Society of America 2026

Salt Lake City, Utah

July 3, 2026

The journal at a glance

• Founded 1998; published by Wiley in association with the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research)
• International, high-selectivity outlet for concise, conceptually novel ecology
• Rolling online publication · ISSN 1461-023X (print) / 1461-0248 (online)

~1 min. Open by placing the journal: young by the standards of the field (1998), but quickly one of ecology’s most selective venues. The Wiley–CNRS pairing is unusual and worth a beat — it is a commercial publisher working with a national research agency.

By the numbers

• Impact factor 7.9 (2024 Journal Citation Reports) — consistently among the top general-ecology journals
• Highly selective: the majority of submissions are declined, many without review
• Short-format by design — a Letter is capped at 5000 words

~1 min. The IF number matters less than what it signals: this is a venue where space is scarce and the bar is high, which is exactly why editorial judgment carries so much weight. Tie forward to the article-types slide — selectivity plus tight word limits.

A commercial journal with a national-agency backbone

~30 sec. Divider into the history/ownership point. The CNRS association is the distinctive fact most people in the room will not know.

History and the CNRS

• Launched in 1998 and built quickly into a flagship outlet for general and theoretical ecology
• Published by Wiley in association with the CNRS — France’s national research organization, founded in 1939 and one of the largest in the world
• The partnership gives the journal a scientific, non-commercial anchor: editorial direction sits with the scientific board, not the publisher

~1.5 min. Make the point that the CNRS tie shapes the culture — the journal answers to a research community, not only to a publisher’s bottom line. This connects to the society-journal ethos Volker will describe for The American Naturalist.

The senior editorial team

Pete Thrall
Editor-in-Chief

John Drake
Methods & Perspectives

Jonathan Chase
Syntheses

Helene Muller-Landau
Senior Editor

Barbara Han
Senior Editor

Akira Mori
Senior Editor

The senior editors set policy and make the final call; each stewards one or more article types. Behind them, the editorial office — Nathalie Espuno and Stephane Hello — keeps papers moving. They are real people in real offices, not bots, and responsiveness to their emails is the single most important courtesy an editor can offer.

~1.5 min. Introduce the senior team and say what “senior editor” means here — we set policy and make the final call. Some of us own a specific article type (I handle Methods and Perspectives; Jon Chase handles Syntheses); Helene, Barbara, and Akira serve as general senior editors. Then spend a real moment on the office: the fastest way to keep papers moving is to answer Nathalie and Stephane promptly; the slowest papers are almost always waiting on an unresponsive editor.

A distributed editorial board

Three functionally distinct roles:

Role	What they do
Editor-in-Chief & Senior Editors	Set policy, make final decisions and appeals, give strategic direction
Associate Editors	Handle peer review for individual papers: assess, choose reviewers, interpret reviews, recommend a decision
Data Editors	Check code and data availability, open-science compliance, reproducibility

Ecology Letters runs a broad, distributed board rather than a few high-volume handling editors — more expertise, wider representation, fewer bottlenecks.

~1.5 min. This is the structural heart of the talk and the set-up for the whole workshop: AEs recommend, senior editors decide — and the recommendation is usually what becomes the decision. Contrast the distributed model with a small-board journal; each has trade-offs.

The associate editors

Frederick R. Adler
Michelle Afkhami
Marina Alberti
Greg Albery
William Anderegg
Sally Archibald
Louise Amy Ashton
Edith Bai
Petr Baldrian
Gyuri Barabas
Richard D. Bardgett
Andrew Barnes
Ignasi Bartomeus
Frida Ben-Ami
Cleo Bertelsmeier
Carl Boettiger
Jedediah Brodie
Ulrich Brose
James (Jeb) E. Byers
Vincent Calcagno
Cayelan Carey
Jane Catford
Ryan Chisholm
Liza Comita
Julien Cote
Franck Courchamp
Tad Dallas
Jonathan Davies
Nico De Bruyn
Frédérik De Laender
Luc De Meester
Franciska De Vries
Laura Dee
Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo
Hideyuki Doi
Ian Donohue
Anu Eskelinen
Laura L. Figueroa
Claire Fortunel
Jean-Michel Gaillard
José María Gómez
Martin Gossner
Gregory Grether
Paulo Roberto Guimarães
Vishwesha Guttal
Nick Haddad
Fangliang He
Mikko Heino
Fujio Hyodo
Punidan Jeyasingh
Anna Jolles
Ferenc Jordán
Po-Ju Ke
Johannes M H Knops
Sarah Knowles
Meghna Krishnadas
Kevin Lafferty
Jonathan Lenoir
Lee Hsiang Liow
Lingli Liu
Dustin Marshall
Jason Matthiopoulos
Sean Michaletz
Arne Mooers
Juan Manuel Morales
Erin Mordecai
David Mouillot
Stephen Munch
Tamara Münkemüller
Shuli Niu
Vojtech Novotny
Rick Ostfeld
Jelena Pantel
Josep Peñuelas
Malin L. Pinsky
Mathias Pires
Timothée Poisot
Jennifer Powers
Heather Reynolds
Pejman Rohani
Kristen Ruegg
Rob Salguero-Gómez
Christoph Scherber
Thad Scott
Marc-André Selosse
Emily Shepard
Lauren Shoemaker
Andrew Sih
Chuliang Song
Gabriele Sorci
Orr Spiegel
Adrian Stier
David Storch
Nathan Swenson
Marlee Tucker
Ted Turlings
Wim H. van der Putten
Diego Vázquez
Montserrat Vilà
Cyrille Violle
Shaopeng Wang
David Westneat
John J. Wiens
John Williams
Tim Wootton

~1 min. Don’t read the names — the wall is the point. A board of ~105 specialists across dozens of countries and career stages is what lets the journal match any paper to an editor who actually knows the subfield. (Roster from the editor-match reference; refresh if the board has changed.)

Article types

Type	Purpose	Limit
Letter	Main article type — concise, novel primary research	5000 words · 6 display items
Review & Synthesis	Synthetic advances that reshape a question	7500 words · 10 display items
Perspective	Forward-looking conceptual argument	7500 words · 10 display items
Methods	New methodological or analytical tools	5000 words · 6 display items
Viewpoint	Short opinion or commentary	2000 words · 2 display items
Technical Note	Brief technical point	800 words · 2 display items

Match the recommendation to the type: do not decline a Methods paper for being methodological, or a Viewpoint for being short.

~1.5 min. Walk the table quickly. The teaching point is fit-to-section — a common AE error is judging a paper against the wrong template. Limits are from the current author guidelines; re-check before presenting.

How it all moves: REX

REX is the submission and editorial system where the whole workflow lives — assignments, reviewer invitations, recommendations, and the office’s messages to you.

~1 min. Screenshot to be captured. Give a quick orientation to what an AE sees when they log in: the assignment queue, the reviewer tools, and where the recommendation is entered. Keep it concrete so first-time AEs recognize the screen when they meet it.

The rest is judgment

Which is what the next ninety minutes are about.

~30 sec. Hand back to the panel flow. The mechanics are simple; the hard part — the judgment — is the workshop.