As Editor-in-Chief, I am very proud to announce the launch of
Grasses (ISSN: 2813-3463) [
1], a new international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on all basic and applied fields related to grass, including grass and forage production, genetic breeding, monitoring and utilization with an agro-ecological approach.
These are times of great challenges and concerns in relation to climate and agriculture.
Grasses are an important component of agro-ecosystems. They play an irreplaceable role in supplying sustainable feed to livestock, and, due to their ecosystem services, a potential role in greenhouse gas mitigation, preserving soil fertility, combatting soil erosion on steep slopes and balancing and reducing agriculture environmental impact.
With this in mind, this journal aims to design a new innovative agriculture in which grasses could play not a secondary role, but a hinge role between livestock and agriculture, to promote the change towards conservative and regenerative agriculture.
The journal aims to explore traditional and innovative yet sustainable cropping systems (i.e., agroforestry, mixed cropping, strip cropping, relay cropping, pixel cropping, etc.) based on forage resources (i.e., forage species and grain crops as feed, forage mixtures, hay and silage, management techniques, quantitative and qualitative forage improvement, pasture improvement, foraging behaviour of livestock, grazing methods, etc.) which also use innovative tools to evaluate grass roles and traits (i.e., ecological footprint, carbon footprint, modelling, proximate and remote grasses monitoring, agro-biodiversity, etc.).
The Grasses journal then hopes to represent the space for global debate on forages and pastures to fill the knowledge gaps in agronomic and ecological aspects of grassland cultivation, to bridge the science to wider society and to be a useful tool for future policy decisions.
My intention is to contribute to the creation of a highly competitive journal with a rigorous peer-reviewed process that drives the transition towards more sustainable forage and pasture cultivation and management. The mission of Grasses is to publish up-to-date research articles of high quality and originality, along with in-depth literature and systematic and meta-analysis reviews.
I strongly encourage all those in the fields of agronomy, biology and ecology related to grasses to submit their cutting-edge research to our journal.