It’s one year since Communications Earth & Environment started publishing its first articles! We’ve chosen to celebrate our first milestone with an anniversary collection of articles from our Editorial Board members and authors who have made our first year such a successful one.

In our anniversary editorial, we take a look back at a year that has seen us receive over 1,000 submissions from around the world, maintain a diverse pool of reviewers and grow our fantastic Editorial Board to encompass 30 active researchers with a breadth of expertise.

As a community journal, our Editorial Board Members have been a key factor in allowing us to grow throughout our first year whilst we retain a close connection with the communities we serve. We asked them to highlight the important questions and key advances in their fields that make now a particularly exciting time to conduct research in the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Their viewpoints are collated thematically into four Comment articles on the oceans and cryosphere, human-environment interactions, solid Earth sciences and the atmosphere.

Finally, we have taken this opportunity to launch a new series of careers perspectives which will focus on the ways that publishing a paper in Communications Earth & Environment has influenced the lives and careers of the authors of some of our most influential articles. In the first of this series, Michalea King provides an eye-opening account of the contrast between the isolation of completing a PhD during a global pandemic and the spotlight of media attention following the publication of her work.

Whether it’s predicting the impacts of climate change, understanding environmental processes or investigating the history of the Earth itself, we’re proud to have provided a home for important research of great value to specialists across our communities over the past year. Here’s to many more!

Poster image credit: Pexels from Pixabay