New Phytologist

New Phytologist (new-phytologist)

Journal positioning

New Phytologist, published by the New Phytologist Foundation, is a plant-science journal with a long-standing strength in plant ecology, physiology, environmental interactions, and symbiosis — mycorrhizal and other plant–microbe relationships, whole-plant function, and processes that scale from organism to community and ecosystem. Its defining expectation is a conceptual advance with integrative breadth: a study that changes how a process is understood by connecting levels of organization, rather than a tightly bounded mechanistic result. A study whose contribution is a single gene-to-function molecular mechanism with no physiological, ecological, or whole-organism reach usually fits a cellular/molecular journal better. This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current author guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live New Phytologist author guidance.

When to trigger

• The author names New Phytologist and wants a fit/framing check for an integrative plant-ecology, physiology, or symbiosis paper.
• A whole-plant or ecosystem-scale result must be framed as a conceptual advance that connects mechanism to function across scales.
• The author is deciding between New Phytologist and the-plant-journal and needs the ecology/physiology-breadth versus molecular-mechanism distinction made explicit.
• The author needs New Phytologist's desk-reject heuristics and a credible alternative route.

Scope & topic fit

• Plant physiology and whole-plant function: water relations, carbon and nutrient economy, photosynthesis, and stress ecophysiology with conceptual reach.
• Plant–microbe and plant–plant interactions, especially mycorrhizal and other symbioses, including nutrient exchange and community consequences.
• Plant ecology and environmental responses, including community, ecosystem, and global-change-relevant processes anchored in plant function.
• Plant–environment interactions spanning soil, climate, and biotic context where the plant is central to the process.
• Evolutionary ecology, functional and trait-based approaches that integrate across levels.
• Methods and conceptual syntheses that advance integrative plant science.

Method & evidence bar

• The contribution must be an integrative conceptual advance: it should connect levels (molecule → organism → community/ecosystem) or generalize beyond one system.
• Physiological and ecological claims need adequate replication, defensible experimental or observational design, and appropriate mixed-model or multivariate statistics.
• Field and common-garden studies must address environmental variation, pseudoreplication, and scale of inference explicitly.
• Symbiosis and interaction studies need controls that isolate the interaction and quantify fluxes or fitness consequences, not just co-occurrence.
• Data and, where applicable, code/sequence data should be deposited in FAIR community repositories with accessions cited.

Structure & house style

• New Phytologist publishes research articles, rapid reports, and commissioned reviews/ viewpoints (Tansley reviews/insights); re-check current article types on the live guide.
• The introduction must frame the conceptual question and the integrative gap, not catalogue a study system.
• Figures should make the cross-scale or mechanistic-to-functional argument visible; experimental design and statistics must be transparent.
• Methods and data-availability statements must let a reader reproduce the analysis; ecological metadata and sampling design should be complete.