- InvasIve specIes, management for conservatIon and remote sensIng - 1 Applied Vegetation Science 11: 1-2, 2008 doi: 10.3170/2008-7-18469, published online 16 January 2008 © IAVS; Opulus Press Uppsala. Editors’ Award for 2007 The paper chosen for the award by the Chief Editors of Applied Vegetation Science, from among those published in 2007 is that by Hartman & McCarthy (2007). Exotic (alien, non-indigenous) species are a concern for their impact on native communities, as well as fascinating probes into community structure: natural experiments. Recent research has tried to measure their impact by examining invaded and non-invaded sites. This approach has the law that the non-invaded sites may not have been invaded because they were different in the irst place. Examining sites before and after an invasion is dificult because invasions are not normally noticed until after they have happened, and anyway there might have been an allogenic environmental change, or one caused by the reaction of the other species. The ideal would be to go backwards in time in both invaded and non-invaded sites. Impossible? But Hartman & McCarthy (2007) did this by dendrochronology. Working in deciduous hardwood forest in Ohio, USA, they shewed that the exotic understorey shrub Lonicera maackii (Rupr.) Herder reduced the growth of native trees in the overstorey. Covers and conservation We are delighted with the photographic covers that our publishers are now able to give each issue. They are chosen mainly for the help they give to the reader in un- derstanding one of the papers in the issue, though we like pretty pictures as much as anyone. The cover of the April issue shewed fruit of the shrub Hippophae rhamnoides L., which has been invading coastal dunes in northwestern Europe. A study of this species by Isermann et al. (2007) indicated the need for management intervention. Fire was illustrated on the August cover, to illustrate the study of Seefeldt et al. (2007) into its use in vegetation management. Prescribed ire is a vital tool for the management of natural communities in many parts of the world but a very sensitive politicial issue, so ecologists need to have irm information on its effect to advocate its use. The December issue gave a rabbit’s-eye view of a species-rich fen meadow, one that was used as Invasive species, management for conservation and remote sensing Wilson, J. Bastow 1 ; Chiarucci, Alessandro 2 ; Díaz, Sandra 3 & White, Peter S. 4 1 Botany Department, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand; E-mail bastow@bastow.ac.nz; 2 Department of Environmental Science ‘G. Sarfatti’, University of Siena, Via P.A. Mattioli 4, 53100 Siena, Italy; E-mail chiarucci@unisi.it; 3 Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Casilla de Correo, RA-5000 Córdoba, Argentina; E-mail sdiaz@com.uncor.edu; 4 Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280, USA; E-mail peter.white@unc.edu a donor site for hay to seed the restoration of a re-wetted fen (Rasan et al. 2007). Thus, these three covers illustrate problems of management and restoration. Another study of management for restoration is that of Critchley et al. (2007) on hay meadows in an ‘Environmentally Sensitive Area’ (ESA) in northern England. Permanent quadrats had been set up in 1987, and they re-recorded them in 2002. The species-rich grassland there had declined in the forb richness, in spite of the ESA-imposed management res- trictions that were designed to prevent this. Over all the sites, differences in management had only minor effects on conservation value in terms of species composition, but the recommended absence of spring grazing, absence of cattle grazing, late hay cutting and maintenance of low soil fertility all promoted forb richness as intended. Effective restoration and conservation requires such monitoring of progress. The journal’s scope includes management for the conservation of threatened species, so long as this is seen within a community context. For example, Rautiainen et al. (2007) discuss the dificult problem of three threatened early-successional species, which depend for their conti- nued existence on the maintenance of disturbed areas. The authors experimented with mowing, shrub removal and soil perturbation as types of disturbance. Such treatments increased the abundance of two of the species, but not that of a Puccinellia Parl. species. They suggested that whilst such management tools would have conservation value, these early-successional species really need open habitats, and should be conserved in the landscape by being transplanted to new, bare islets beyond the range of their unaided dispersal ability. Virtually any management or restoration scheme in a terrestrial ecosystem needs a vegetation target, but it is often dificult to know what this should be. Both the Journal of Vegetation Science and Applied Vegetation Science are interested in palaeoecology. Behling et al. (2007) used radiocarbon dating and palynology to determine the history of a grassland/forest mosaic in Brazil, which could be used to set management objectives for conservation. They con- cluded that the mosaic was natural, having existed for over 1200 years. The grasslands were caused by ire, perhaps natural and perhaps originally set by Amerindians, rather