Editorial.

In my last Editorial, I wrote about the strong participation of African research in the Joint Meeting held by the British Ecological Society Tropical Ecology Group and the Society for Tropical Ecology in Edinburgh this April. Our contributing authors are in the vast majority from African institutions, something which marks out the important role this journal plays, as this is the only peer-reviewed scientific publication that has this author profile. This Special Section was carefully structured to contain thorough reviews of various aspects of the emerging field and pair them with original research papers that illustrated the points in the review. [Extracted from the article]