Journal Opens Special Issue on Evolutionary Mechanisms Shaping Biodiversity

A peer-reviewed open-access journal is inviting researchers worldwide to rethink how life’s staggering variety comes into being, changes over time, and manages to persist. Biological Diversity, a journal published by Wiley on behalf of the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has opened a call for papers for a new special issue titled Decoding Biodiversity through Evolution: Mechanisms of Biodiversity Formation, Evolution, and Maintenance. The announcement, released from Guangzhou on 29 September 2026, sets a submission deadline of 31 August 2027 and signals an unusually broad ambition: to assemble, in one collection, studies that treat biodiversity not as a static inventory of species but as the dynamic outcome of evolutionary processes operating across every branch of the tree of life.

The framing matters because much of biodiversity science has historically been fragmented. Studies of speciation often focus on a single region or a single group of organisms, and the same is true of work on adaptation, community ecology, and biogeography. The editors of the special issue argue that explaining Earth’s biological richness requires connecting these threads into a single mechanistic chain, from the origin of genetic variation through lineage diversification and trait evolution to the assembly of communities and the long-term persistence of diversity. The call explicitly welcomes contributions that cross-compare across the tree of life, across levels of biological organization, and across timescales, from deep-time macroevolution to contemporary eco-evolutionary feedbacks.

Guest editing the issue is Professor Pat Heslop-Harrison of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, an evolutionary biologist known for work on plant genomes and genome evolution. According to the announcement, the special issue aims to build a unified evolutionary framework for understanding biodiversity, and the editors welcome rigorous approaches of every kind: theoretical modelling, experimental work, field observation, comparative analysis, data synthesis, and the development of new methods that unpack the evolutionary foundations of diversity and inform the conservation of adaptive potential. That methodological openness is one of the issue’s defining features, since the organizers have deliberately avoided restricting submissions to any particular technique, taxon, or region.

The timing of such a call is no accident. A wave of technological advances has transformed what is possible in evolutionary and biodiversity research. Phylogenomics now allows researchers to reconstruct the branching history of lineages with unprecedented resolution using genome-scale data. Pangenomics captures the full spectrum of genetic variation within a species rather than relying on a single reference genome, revealing how variable genomes really are. Metagenomics extends this power to entire microbial communities, experimental evolution lets scientists watch adaptation unfold in real time, and ancient DNA recovers genetic information from organisms that lived thousands of years ago. Digitized natural-history collections, long-term ecological monitoring programs, and artificial intelligence tools for analyzing massive ecological and genomic datasets round out a toolkit that previous generations of biologists could scarcely have imagined.

Together, these methods make it feasible, for the first time, to test general rules about how biodiversity is generated and maintained across animals, plants, fungi, microbes, and viruses. The special issue’s thematic scope reflects that breadth. Listed topics include speciation and lineage diversification; genomic variation and adaptive phenotypic change; hybridization, introgression, and reticulate evolution; functional-trait and niche evolution; biotic interactions and co-evolution; community assembly and the persistence of rare species; eco-evolutionary feedback; deep-time biogeography; multi-evidence cross-taxon comparisons; and evolutionary responses under global change that can inform conservation practice.

Several of these themes deserve particular attention because they represent areas where evolutionary thinking is actively reshaping established views. Reticulate evolution, for example, acknowledges that lineages do not always diverge cleanly along a branching tree. Hybridization and introgression, in which species exchange genes after splitting, can transfer adaptations between lineages, blur species boundaries, and even generate new evolutionary trajectories. Similarly, eco-evolutionary feedback describes the loop in which ecological conditions drive evolutionary change, and evolved traits in turn alter ecological dynamics, a coupling that challenges the traditional separation of ecology and evolution into separate timescales and separate disciplines.

Community assembly and species coexistence form another conceptual frontier. Why some species become rare and others abundant, and how diverse communities persist without collapsing into dominance by a few competitors, are questions that increasingly draw on evolutionary explanations, including the history of trait divergence among co-occurring lineages. Deep-time biogeography adds a historical dimension, using phylogenetic and fossil evidence to reconstruct how lineages dispersed, diversified, and went extinct as continents shifted and climates changed. By encouraging cross-taxon comparisons that integrate multiple lines of evidence, the special issue is positioned to showcase work that treats these questions as interconnected rather than isolated.

The practical stakes are considerable. Under global environmental change, species are shifting ranges, communities are reorganizing, and adaptive potential has become a central concept in conservation planning. Evolutionary-informed conservation asks not only which species are threatened but which populations carry the genetic and phenotypic variation needed to persist under future conditions. The special issue’s inclusion of evolutionary responses under global change as an explicit theme underscores the organizers’ intent that the collection speak to conservation practice as well as to fundamental theory, bridging a gap that has often separated academic evolutionary biology from on-the-ground biodiversity management.

For prospective authors, the logistics are straightforward. Manuscripts should follow the journal’s author guidelines and be designated for the special issue during online submission, using the dropdown menu that responds to the question of whether a submission is for a special issue. Article processing charges are fully waived for this issue, removing a common financial barrier for researchers, particularly those working in institutions with limited publication funds. The journal, which carries the ISSN 2994-4139, is sponsored by the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published in partnership with John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. It is indexed in Chemical Abstracts Service and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and it welcomes original research, reviews, commentaries, and short communications spanning botany, zoology, microbiology, taxonomy, phylogenetics, genomics, ecology, climatology, and related disciplines.

Whether the special issue succeeds in its unifying ambition will depend on the community’s response, but the call arrives at a moment when the intellectual ingredients for synthesis are unusually well aligned. Genomic and ecological data streams are richer than ever, computational tools can integrate them at scale, and there is growing recognition across subfields that biodiversity’s origin, change, and persistence form a single evolutionary narrative. Researchers with theoretical models, long-term field datasets, comparative genomic analyses, or novel methods relevant to any stage of that narrative now have until 31 August 2027 to contribute to what the editors hope will become a landmark reference point for understanding how evolution builds and sustains the living world.

Subject of Research: A special issue of the journal Biological Diversity inviting research on evolutionary mechanisms underlying biodiversity formation, evolution, and maintenance

Article Title: New special issue of Biological Diversity call for papers decoding biodiversity through evolutionary mechanisms

Article References: New special issue of Biological Diversity call for papers decoding biodiversity through evolutionary mechanisms. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: biodiversity, evolution, speciation, phylogenomics, reticulate evolution, community assembly, eco-evolutionary feedback, biogeography, adaptive evolution, conservation, Biological Diversity journal, call for papers