Editors’ Choice

In this issue, we are launching a new initiative for the Journal of Applied Ecology: Editor's Choice. Each issue, the Editors will choose one paper to highlight, which will be subjected to increased publicity and availability on the journal website and in journal marketing. The Editors will write a short commentary explaining why this paper has been picked out for particular attention. It is not possible to submit a paper for consderation for Editors’ Choice – the choice is made post hoc, based on the contents of the particular issue.

This will of course be a difficult decision, because the papers that are published in this highly competitive journal are all of top quality. However, we will seek to highlight papers that are especially timely, that were particularly praised by the reviewers as being of especially high quality, and that we believe best fulfil the journal's mission of publishing ecological studies with management relevance.

To kick off this initiative, we have chosen Lian Pin Koh's paper ‘Can oil palm plantations be made more hospitable for forest butterflies and birds?’. Given that much tropical forest will inevitably be converted to oil palm in the next few years, there is an urgent need to consider how best to mitigate the damage caused to biodiversity by these plantations. Rather than simply documenting the destruction to primary forests that such conversion entails, we need to move on to giving concrete guidance on how best to ensure that biodiversity thrives within the new land use. Lian Pin Koh's paper does just that.

Lian Pin Koh's work was carried out while he was a PhD student at Princeton. His work is impressive in the extent of his sampling – it is notoriously difficult to obtain access to oil palm plantations for biodiversity work, but his study covers 15 plantations.

The study considers the effect of both local- and landscape-level vegetation characteristics on the number of forest-dwelling bird and butterfly species encountered per unit area. The author is careful to focus on differences in local vegetation that were within the power of managers to influence – an important consideration if the work is to be management-relevant. However, he found that the potential management interventions he examined within plantations (encouraging epiphytes, beneficial plants or weed cover) only had a small effect on species numbers. At the landscape level, the presence of natural forests (primary forest for butterflies, young secondary forest for birds) had a stronger effect, although even then biodiversity enhancement was predicted only to be of the order of 2–3 species of bird and the same for butterflies, which is not a huge number compared to the diversity of these species in undisturbed forest.

Lian Pin Koh has carried out an elegant ecological study that addresses an important and very current issue, providing results that directly translate to management recommendations. His paper is a very worthy recipient of the first Editor's Choice award.