Over the past 93 years, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) has published the journal Brittonia. Today, we are delighted to report on important improvements and changes that are taking place at the journal, in collaboration with our publishing partner, SpringerNature.

Firstly, we have worked hard to increase the size and diversity of our Editorial Board, which now includes many more members from beyond the staff of NYBG, representing institutions from elsewhere in the United States and from a range of other countries. The current board comprises 22 members, up from eight members only 1.5 years ago. We are especially grateful to the 19 Associate Editors, who play such a crucial role in handling the peer review process for each new submission and assisting authors to improve and revise their manuscripts. We are eager to build up the diversity of Editorial Board even further, so we welcome inquiries as to how you might join us as an Associate Editor.

Two new positions have also been created within the Editorial Board. The Managing Editor helps to coordinate and facilitate the post-review/proofing process with authors and SpringerNature, and provides other much needed support for the Editor-in-Chief. We are grateful to Dr. Kate E. Armstrong for taking on the inaugural role as Brittonia’s Managing Editor. We have also established the post of Red List Editor, who has the responsibility of reviewing all threat-of-extinction assessments. Given the importance of conserving threatened plant species, this editorial position is vital to ensure that assessments published in Brittonia are completed correctly and with rigor. Dr. Nelson Salinas has graciously agreed to serve as the first editor in this role.

In this first issue of Volume 76, we introduce a larger page size for the journal, together with a new, cleaner layout. We hope that these changes will facilitate a broadening of the types of papers that authors will consider submitting to Brittonia. Over the past years, the journal has become especially well known for publishing descriptions of new species, and we would like to continue in that fine tradition. But systematic botany is much broader than that one topic, so we are eager to receive manuscripts dealing with many other topics in this field, including (but not limited to) short revisions, phylogenetic and biogeographic studies, morphological and anatomical studies, descriptions of floras, and summaries of botanical histories, as long such papers provide a context in plant systematics.

In conjunction with the new size and layout, we have updated our formatting instructions, simplifying the number of styles of fonts in an attempt to make formatting your papers a bit more intuitive. These instructions also provide additional examples of manuscript parts that authors sometimes find challenging to interpret. The new formatting instructions can be found at Springer’s Brittonia website (https://link.springer.com/journal/12228/submission-guidelines).

Finally, we are planning to develop a new, semi-regular feature that will be called The Botanist’s Toolkit. These articles could cover a variety of topics related to the improvement of how we do plant systematics. Examples include notes explaining new software, techniques for collecting particular groups of plants, construction of field tools and equipment (such as portable specimen dryers or telescopic pole pruners, or creative use of drones), photography tips, etc. Submissions under this category could range in length from very short notes to longer contributions, and could take advantage of a variety of flexible formats.

We hope that you, our readers and authors, will continue to support the near-century long legacy of Brittonia in its mission to disseminate the results of plant-systematic studies, which are so central to documenting and understanding the Earth’s amazing plant diversity.

—Gregory M. Plunkett, Editor-in-Chief