What is this collection about?
Understanding species interactions is fundamental to ecology, shaping community structure, ecosystem functioning, and responses to rapid environmental change. These interactions occur across diverse ecological contexts, from plant–pollinator mutualisms to antagonistic interactions including predation, parasitism, and competition. As ecosystems are increasingly altered, experimentally testing interactions across broad spatial and temporal scales has become particularly important for gaining mechanistic insights and improving predictions. Manipulative field experiments are especially powerful in this regard, providing direct evidence of how these interactions unfold in natural settings. In parallel, network-based approaches offer insights into the complexity and stability of ecological communities, linking pairwise interactions to broader food web structure and trophic dynamics.
Communications Biology invites submissions that employ manipulative and experimental approaches in communities of macroorganisms to investigate species interactions and their consequences for ecological networks; studies spanning broad spatial and temporal scales are particularly encouraged.
Topics of interest include:
· Plant–pollinator interactions and other mutualisms
· Competitive interactions within and across trophic levels
· Predator–prey and parasite–host dynamics
· Trophic ecology and food web structure
· Ecological network organization and stability
We mainly invite Research Articles but will also consider Perspectives, Reviews and Mini-Reviews. All submissions will undergo the same review process and editorial standards as regular submissions to the journal.
Why submit to a collection?
Collections like this one help promote high-quality science. They are led by In-House Editors who are experts in their fields and supported by a dedicated team of Commissioning Editors and Managing Editors at Springer Nature. Collection manuscripts typically see higher citations, downloads, and Altmetric scores, and provide a one-stop-shop on a cutting-edge topic of interest.
This Collection welcomes submissions from all authors – and not by invitation only – on the condition that the manuscripts fall within the scope of the Collection and of Communications Biology more generally. See our editorial process page for more details. All manuscripts published in the collection are hosted on a dedicated nature portfolio portal, giving articles high visibility beyond the journal they are published in.
Who is involved?
Communications Biology is edited by both in-house professional editors and Editorial Board Members.
Our editors work closely together to ensure the quality of our published papers and consistency in author experience.
How can I submit my paper?
Visit the Collection page to find out more about this collection and submit your article.