Every year Journal of Applied Ecology awards the Southwood Prize to the best paper in the journal by an author at the start of their research career. With entries spanning the 59th volume of the journal, our Senior Editors carefully shortlisted the following 12 papers.

Chongzhe Zhang with ‘Leveraging functional traits of cover crops to coordinate crop productivity and soil health’

Elizabeth Koziol with ‘Manipulating plant microbiomes in the field: Native mycorrhizae advance plant succession and improve native plant restoration’

Douglas Cirino with ‘Balanced spatial distribution of green areas creates healthier urban landscapes’

Mahmood Soofi with ‘Quantifying the relationship between prey density, livestock and illegal killing of leopards’

Sarah Schwieger with ‘Rewetting prolongs root growing season in minerotrophic peatlands and mitigates negative drought effects’

Paula Prist with ‘Roads and forest edges facilitate yellow fever virus dispersion’

Ricard Arasa-Gisbert with ‘Forest loss and treeless matrices cause the functional impoverishment of sapling communities in old-growth forest patches across tropical regions’

Melina de Souza Leite with ‘Matrix quality determines the strength of habitat loss filtering on bird communities at the landscape scale’

Nicholas Balfour with ‘The disproportionate value of ‘weeds’ to pollinators and biodiversity’

Deqiang Ma with ‘The consequences of coastal offsets for fisheries’

Eleanor Warren-Thomas with ‘No evidence for trade-offs between bird diversity, yield and water table depth on oil palm smallholdings: Implications for tropical peatland landscape restoration’

Corina Maurer with ‘Different types of semi-natural habitat are required to sustain diverse wild bee communities across agricultural landscapes’

Interested to know who the winner is? Stay tuned for the final announcement soon!