Dear authors, reviewers and readers,

It is my great pleasure to send you a warm welcome as the new Editor-in Chief of Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments! After 14 extremely successful years Peter Königshof decided that it is time to say good bye and to hand over this duty*. After supporting the journal in different roles for many years, as an author, reviewer and guest-editor, I accepted this challenge and the huge responsibility that comes with this task.

I can only congratulate Peter and his team, most importantly Sinje Weber our trusted managing editor, for the work they have done in the last 14 years. With immense and enthusiastic commitment they developed Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments into an internationally well recognised journal that bridges different aspects of palaeosciences. Thank you Peter and Sinje, for all the excellent work you have done during these last years, but also a great thank you to all our authors, reviewers, guest-editors and readers, as well as the colleagues who voluntarily helped to improve language issues with manuscripts (and Editorials)! You have made the journal what it is today!

Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments was, is and will be a multidimensional gateway for the exploration of scientific discoveries and new research in geological and palaeontological sciences. The scientific concept has a well-established special focus on the interaction of palaeoenvironments and fossils (as the remains of formerly living organisms) and we will continue to develop the journal in this direction during the next years to come. We will also continue to publish a mixture of Special Issues, Special Series and individual original papers as well as review articles, which proved to be highly successful so far. So, if you have any interesting idea for a Special Issue or a Special Series of articles, please do not hesitate to contact Sinje or me.

There will certainly be some changes to the journal in the next years, as change is a normal part of life on Earth, as we all know from our experience with past organisms and ecosystems, but (hopefully) there will be no abrupt or radical changes. We will strive to follow the tracks that were so well-established by Peter, but we will probably deviate sometimes from these tracks to follow new and exciting scientific aspects, always trying to improve the journal and its scientific impact. For the latter we will certainly keep an eye on established and upcoming bibliometric indicators, but these have neither been in the past, nor will they in the future be the leading guide-lines when it comes to editorial decisions!

I strongly share Peter’s position that editorial decisions should in no way be affected by the origins of a manuscript, the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of any of the authors (Königshof 2022)! As in the past, decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or any other agencies beyond the journal itself, only by the science itself, which is absolutely in line with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) standards, which the journal supports.

We are currently in a time of multiple global crises and although palaeontology can probably not contribute to help solving all of these, on a large scale man-made, crises, I am really convinced that studies on palaeobiodiversity and palaeoenvironments, including palaeoclimate, and their multitude of interactions have a really large potential to contribute useful lessons from the past, to add improved insights how the Earth system reacted to past (small and large) crises. Not as blueprints, to learn verbatim how the Earth system will behave in the future, but as case studies, to demonstrate how differently and often unpredictably (based only on previously existing knowledge) organisms and ecosystems have reacted to various smaller or larger disturbances on geological timescales.

I am really excited about the new tasks and responsibilities that come with such an editorial duty, although I realise that these will probably be rather ‘time consuming’, but I am more than confident that I will get better than excellent support by Sinje in the coming years (like she supported Peter and the journal in the past 14 years)! I am also really looking forward to cooperate with all of you and to receive your manuscripts to learn more about your outstanding ideas and research about palaeobiodiversity and palaeoenvironments as well as their interactions!

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The new Editor-in-Chief studying Miocene seeds at the SEM (Photo: R. Spiekermann; 02/2023)

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Dieter Uhl

(Frankfurt am Main, Germany, January 2023)