About Plant Diversity

Plant Diversity

Plant Diversity is an open-access international plant science journal based in Kunming, Yunnan, in southwest China, published by KeAi and Elsevier on behalf of the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is the English successor to Plant Diversity and Resources, and before that to Acta Botanica Yunnanica, a lineage that began in 1979. The journal publishes substantial original research and review papers that advance understanding of plant diversity, with a particular focus on the biodiversity, ecology and evolution of the East Asian flora — and it is edited from one of the most plant-rich places on Earth.

Yunnan is not incidental to the journal's identity. The province harbours more than half of the plant species of China, and Kunming is home to the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), one of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' principal centres for taxonomy, biogeography and conservation research. A journal about plant diversity edited from Kunming sits inside its subject matter: the Hengduan Mountains, the Gaoligong range and the tropical forests of Xishuangbanna, all heavily represented in its pages, are among the world's significant biodiversity hotspots.

Overview and identifying details

The journal's ISSN is 2468-2659. Copyright in the journal is held by the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with publishing services provided by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. It is an open-access title: articles are published under open licences, including the CC BY-NC-ND licence shown on its articles, so that research on plant diversity is free for everyone to read and share under the licence terms.

The journal is affiliated with the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Botanical Society of China. Its publishing schedule runs through six issues a year, appearing in January, March, May, July, September and November. It is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, placing its taxonomic, ecological and evolutionary research in the main international citation databases.

History: from Acta Botanica Yunnanica to Plant Diversity

The journal's predecessor, Acta Botanica Yunnanica, was started in 1979 and sponsored by the Kunming Institute of Botany. Its founding editor-in-chief was Professor Wu Zhengyi, one of China's most eminent botanists and winner of the China National Supreme Science and Technology Award in 2007, who served the journal until 2006. Professor Li Dezhu succeeded him as editor-in-chief in 2006. Under Wu's long editorship the journal documented the flora of Yunnan and southwest China — the floristic surveys, taxonomic revisions and vegetation studies on which modern knowledge of the region's plants rests.

In 2011 the journal changed its title to Plant Diversity and Resources and came to be jointly sponsored by KIB and the Botanical Society of China. That title was itself recognised internationally: Plant Diversity and Resources was selected for the "2012 The Highest International Impact Academic Journals" list published in Beijing in December 2012, based on the China Academic Journal International Citation Reports. The journal subsequently adopted the shorter English title Plant Diversity — its articles appear under that title from 2016, with volume 38 published that year — and moved to its present open-access model with KeAi and Elsevier, converting a distinguished regional botany journal into an international English-language platform.

Aims and scope

Plant Diversity describes itself as an international plant science journal publishing substantial original research and review papers that advance understanding of plant diversity. While the focus of the journal is on the biodiversity, ecology and evolution of East Asian flora, it is explicitly not limited to those topics. That formulation gives the journal a clear centre of gravity — the flora of East Asia, and above all southwest China — without closing its pages to comparative and global work that helps explain that flora.

The fields covered span the disciplines needed to understand diversity itself: taxonomy and systematics, which name and classify species; evolution and phylogenetics, which reconstruct their relationships; ecology and biogeography, which explain where species live and why; and conservation biology, which addresses how diversity can survive. Palaeobotanical work also appears, because the present flora of Yunnan can only be understood through its past — reviews in the journal have compiled, for example, the Cenozoic fossil record of the province, hundreds of fossil species of ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms that trace how modern richness formed.

Research themes in practice

The journal's contents show its scope in action. Regional floristic research remains a strength: studies of the origin and evolution of the flora of the Hengduan Mountains, where the area south of 29° N holds the great majority of the region's species on a minority of its land, exemplify the biogeographical questions the journal exists to publish. Work on Yunnan's plant diversity as a whole — a province whose 2016 checklist recorded 19,333 higher plant species in 3,084 genera and 440 families — gives the journal a natural role as a venue for baseline biodiversity science.

At the same time, modern Plant Diversity papers are increasingly phylogenomic and data-driven. A recent collaborative study led from KIB, with partners including the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the University of Edinburgh and the Smithsonian Institution, published in the journal the most comprehensive phylogenomic framework and taxonomic revision to date for the nettle family Urticaceae, built from chloroplast genome and nuclear ribosomal DNA sequences from 485 samples representing 345 species across all 54 genera. Taxonomy in this journal is therefore not only descriptive: it integrates genomics, global sampling and the historical literature to settle classification.

Conservation and special issues

Conservation is a recurring organising theme. The journal has published a special issue on Plant Species with Extremely Small Populations (PSESP) — a concept developed in China to rescue the most globally threatened plant species — presenting seven peer-reviewed articles on seed and spore biology for germplasm banking, genetic diversity and conservation genetics, reproductive and pollination biology, seed dispersal and germplasm, and population restoration by augmentation or reinforcement. A special issue on safeguarding the future by protecting biodiversity carried the widely cited assessment of plant diversity in Yunnan and its future directions.

Current calls continue the pattern: a special issue on "Plant Diversity in Asia: From Past to Present" invites work integrating palaeobotanical data from macrofossils and pollen, molecular phylogeny and ecological studies to understand the assembly and evolutionary resilience of Asian flora across space and time. Special issues of this kind let the journal concentrate community effort on the questions — how Asian plant diversity arose, and how it can persist — that define its field.

Article types and publishing model

The journal publishes original articles, review articles, short letters, modelling/theory and methods articles, and rapid reports, together with special thematic issues. That range serves a discipline with varied outputs: a taxonomic revision, a phylogenetic analysis, a theoretical model of diversification and a rapid report of a significant finding each have a format. Peer review is conducted under the responsibility of the journal's editorial office at KIB, and publication is through Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform and KeAi's journal site, giving articles both a major commercial platform and a Chinese open-access publisher's channel.

As an open-access journal, Plant Diversity makes its articles immediately and permanently free to read, download and distribute. The journal's open-access arrangements have evolved: KeAi's guidance notes that manuscripts submitted after 31 December 2025 require an article processing charge on acceptance, with discounted rates for submissions during 2026 and the Kunming Institute of Botany as the sole authorised service provider for those charges — details authors should confirm on the journal's current open-access page before submitting.

Institutional home: the Kunming Institute of Botany

KIB gives the journal scientific depth that few editorial offices can match. The institute hosts the Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia, a major herbarium tradition built on decades of collecting in southwest China, and research groups working continuously on the plant diversity and evolution of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Himalayas. Its expeditions — including the Kunming Institute of Botany–California Academy of Sciences expeditions in the Gaoligong Shan and Dulong Jiang regions, conducted over several years — have added thousands of specimens to the record on which taxonomic and floristic papers draw.

The journal also marked its community's milestones: a 2018 special collection celebrated eighty years of the Kunming Institute of Botany, including a review of taxonomy at KIB over the decade 2008–2018 and its future directions. A journal that can publish the self-assessment of its own institute's taxonomic programme is functioning as the record of a research school, not merely as a manuscript outlet.

Place in plant science publishing

Within China-based plant journals, Plant Diversity holds the biodiversity and taxonomy niche. Where other leading Chinese titles concentrate on molecular biology, crop science or horticulture, this journal is the home for systematics, floristics, evolution and conservation of wild plants — and for the flora of East Asia in particular. Its indexing in SCI-Expanded and Scopus means that taxonomic and biogeographical work, historically undervalued in citation terms, reaches the international databases through a journal edited by specialists who understand its conventions, from nomenclature to specimen citation.

Internationally, the journal connects three communities that need each other: Chinese botanists holding unmatched knowledge of the East Asian flora; global taxonomists and phylogeneticists whose revisions require that material; and conservation scientists working in the biodiversity hotspots of southwest China and the Himalaya-Hengduan region. Its collaborations — papers co-authored with Kew, Edinburgh and the Smithsonian are representative — show that connection operating in practice.

Readership and authors

Readers of Plant Diversity include taxonomists, systematists, evolutionary biologists, ecologists, biogeographers, palaeobotanists and conservation biologists, together with botanical garden and herbarium professionals — the journal has published, for instance, on the role of botanical gardens in scientific research, conservation and citizen science. Authors are drawn strongly from Chinese institutes working on the East Asian flora, and increasingly from international teams studying Asian plants or collaborating with Chinese collections.

For authors, the journal offers a specialist editorial home that values substantial floristic, taxonomic and evolutionary work, open-access distribution through ScienceDirect, and indexing that makes species-level research discoverable worldwide. That combination — regional depth, institutional backing from KIB and the Botanical Society of China, and international open access — is what Plant Diversity contributes to plant science: a Kunming-edited record of how the world's richest temperate flora is named, explained and protected.