We are modifying ecosystems worldwide and losing biodiversity fast. We are losing not only the result of millions of years of evolution, but we are also missing the opportunity to address interconnected societal and environmental problems such as climate change, the development of sustainable and fair agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and making cities more livable and healthy. Despite an increasing number of scientific journals addressing sectoral aspects of these issues, a truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary journal in ecosystems and biodiversity is missing. The community misses an open access journal where scientists working on a wide range of fields addressing the biodiversity crisis and other environmental challenges can publish their results and interact with a broad group of readers that goes beyond academia to practitioners and decision-makers. PLOS Ecosystems will fill this niche and aims to become a forum for scientific discussion and for the science-policy and science-society interface.

To support this vision for the journal, we structured the sections of PLOS Ecosystems around key topics of the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). There are four sections dedicated to the major drivers of ecosystem change: ‘Ecosystems and Land-use/Sea-use’, ‘Ecosystems and Climate’, ‘Ecosystems and Pollution’, and ‘Sustainable Use of Biodiversity’. Our name for the fourth driver section emphasizes our focus on finding solutions for the biodiversity crisis and also the connection to the themes of the Convention on Biological Diversity. There are then two sections about understanding biodiversity and ecosystems themselves but also about their conservation, restoration and management, one about ‘Terrestrial Ecosystems’ and another about ‘Freshwater and Marine Ecosystems’. We have a section on understanding ‘Ecosystem Functions and Benefits’, i.e., ecosystem services or nature contributions to people (NCPs). Finally, we have a section on understanding ‘Social-Ecological Interactions’, how people manage and affect ecosystems and how people perceive and experience biodiversity and NCPs. We brought together an interdisciplinary team of scientists to lead these sections, who come from all six inhabited continents on our planet. We also have a team of engaged and experienced Academic Editors who provide detailed expertise across the broad journal scope. We are still recruiting with the goal of building a diverse editorial board, so this Editorial is also an invitation for more researchers to apply to join us as Academic Editors.

This first issue of PLOS Ecosystems shows this disciplinary and transdisciplinary breadth that we are aiming for. We have an Opinion paper from Anne Larigauderie [1], who was the executive secretary of IPBES for more than a decade since its inception until recently. She writes about what are major research gaps at the science-policy interface, particularly regarding the knowledge needs to address the implementation gap. We also have a range of other Opinion and Research Articles, covering aspects from wildlife disease surveillance to the modelling of invasion risk, to the impacts of herbicide use in urban areas in Ghana.

I would like to conclude with a few words on another reason that makes PLOS Ecosystems unique. Open science is particularly important for biodiversity and ecosystem research. Most biodiversity is in low-income countries, but historically a lot of the studies have been published in journals that people from those countries had no access to. In addition, the biodiversity data and the code for analysis were often not available. This has started to change in the last few years with the advent of open science journals and of platforms to share biodiversity data, but the costs of publication in the most important journals are often prohibitive for many scientists. PLOS Ecosystems has been established to allow all researchers to publish their work in a broad-impact journal. I emphasize the ‘all’ because PLOS is working to make open access funding more equitable and sustainable (https://plos.org/fees/). In addition, the commitment of PLOS Ecosystems to make data and code public goes beyond other initiatives in the field to make science truly accessible to all, empowering ecosystem and biodiversity managers around the world.