Twenty twenty will be remembered for a number of reasons, but mostly not for the reasons we anticipated in twenty nineteen. In a year that was expected to be all about global political decisions and initiatives to tackle the current biodiversity crisis and climate breakdown, we ended up seeing an unknown virus dramatically change our world: within a few months, the ways we work, live, communicate and think about the future have literally shifted to a new normal. What we have also witnessed, however, is the scientific community coming together to address a complex problem and produce knowledge and solutions at a record pace. Levels of creativity and ingenuity in the face of a global pandemic have been particularly high; in many respects, this boost in innovation can be traced back to the higher occurrence of interdisciplinary discussions facilitated by Covid‐19.

This idea, that bringing people from different scientific backgrounds together can help advance more rapidly the way we think about the functioning and management of our world, was, and still is, the basic tenant of why Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation exists. To an untrained eye, satellite remote sensing, passive acoustic monitoring and camera traps have very little in common, yet the flux of exchanges between users of these technologies has been constantly increasing over the past years, leading to rapid advances in the ways we derive ecologically relevant information from these sensors. Similarly, few would have predicted that conservation biologists and remote sensing specialists would end up reading, and publishing in, the same peer‐reviewed journals, yet the increasing level of submissions and broadening readership of our journal demonstrate that there definitively is appetite for outlets that facilitate a conversation between a diverse range of sensor developers, programmers and remote sensing data users.

As we celebrate our first impact factor, which reflects the quality of the science we expected to publish from day one, our thoughts are with our authors, who trusted our journal despite its lack of impact factor. Over the past years, we have seen scientists from all over the world and multiple disciplines submit genuinely fascinating contributions that have captured, in many instances, the imagination of their peers. From extending the use of camera trap approaches to the monitoring of terrestrial squamate assemblages (Welbourne et al. 2017) to demonstrating how remote sensing of three‐dimensional coral reef structure can enhance predictive modelling of fish assemblages (Wedding et al. 2019), and from developing a measurement protocol to identify the spectral reflectance of whale skin above the sea surface (Cubaynes et al. 2020) to showing how bird roosts could be automatically detected using NEXRAD radar data and convolutional neural networks (Chilson et al. 2019), our authors have pushed the limits of what can be learnt from existing sensors, and by doing so helped inform global discussions about the role of technology to support global biodiversity monitoring efforts.

Their innovative research has helped manage and conserve wildlife, should it be humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae in Australia (Bolin et al. 2020), Weddell seal Leptonychotes weddellii in Antarctica (LaRue et al. 2020), fish in temperate lakes (Mouget et al. 2019) or bats in the Amazonian rainforest (Torrent et al. 2018). But their work has also helped formulate the design of the monitoring approaches considered by others, providing key guidance to people making a leap of faith in the unknown by giving a go to technologies and algorithms they have never used before. This is well exemplified by the contribution of Duffy and colleagues (2018), who helped people appreciate some of the key issues to be considered when using lightweight drones in challenging environments; or by the contribution of Piña‐Covarrubias and colleagues (2019), who described ways to optimize sensor deployment for acoustic detection and localization in terrestrial environments. Similarly, the work by Pasquarella and colleagues (2016) helped demonstrate how time series of all available Landsat observations could be leveraged to map and monitor ecosystem state and dynamics, thereby illustrating current prospects available to environmental managers and ecosystem ecologists. And then there’s the review by Caravaggi and colleagues (2017), which helped identify present and future opportunities to advance conservation behaviour research using camera trapping.

Securing an impact factor is a big step for a peer‐reviewed journal, but ultimately this accomplishment reflects the achievement of a whole community. To forge a path from the decision to start the journal in 2014 to this moment in time has indeed required trust in the overall endeavour from a multitude of people (authors, reviewers, editors), who decided to invest time and energy in something new despite having no guarantee of return. Many took the risk and helped us publish contributions that, taken as a whole, provide an incredible resource for scientists, managers, educators and policy makers interested in understanding and advancing opportunities to monitor and predict the dynamics of our natural capital globally. This success is their success. The future success of this journal will likely be yours.

记住二十二十个原因有很多，但大多数不是因为我们在二十一个月的预期而被记住的。在预计将是有关解决当前生物多样性危机和气候崩溃的全球政治决策和倡议的一年中，我们最终看到了一种未知病毒，极大地改变了我们的世界：在几个月内，我们的工作，生活，沟通方式并思考未来已从字面上转移到新常态。但是，我们还目睹了科学界齐心协力解决复杂问题，并以创纪录的速度提供知识和解决方案。面对全球大流行，创造力和创造力水平特别高；在许多方面，

将来自不同科学背景的人们聚集在一起的想法可以帮助我们更快地推进我们对世界功能和管理的思考方式，这一直是，现在仍然是生态学和保护遥感的基本租户。存在。对于未经训练的人来说，卫星遥感，无源声波监测和摄像机陷阱几乎没有什么共同点，但是这些技术的用户之间的交流在过去几年中一直在不断增加，这导致我们在生态学方面的发展迅速进步。这些传感器的相关信息。同样，很少有人会预料到保护生物学家和遥感专家最终会阅读和发表相同的经过同行评审的期刊，但是投稿水平的提高和我们期刊的读者人数的增加表明，对于那些促进各种传感器开发人员，程序员和遥感数据用户之间的对话。

当我们庆祝我们的第一个影响因子时，它反映了我们从一开始就希望发表的科学质量，我们的思想与我们的作者有关，尽管缺乏影响因子，他们还是信任我们的期刊。在过去的几年中，我们看到来自世界各地的多个学科的科学家提出了真正令人着迷的贡献，这些贡献在许多情况下都吸引了同行的想象力。从扩大使用相机陷阱方法到监测陆地鳞状鳞片组合（Welbourne等人，2017年）到论证三维珊瑚礁结构的遥感如何增强鱼类组合的预测模型（Wedding等人，2019年）），并从制定测量协议以识别海平面以上的鲸鱼皮的光谱反射率（Cubaynes等人，2020年）到显示如何使用NEXRAD雷达数据和卷积神经网络自动检测鸟类的栖息地（Chilson等人，2019年）），我们的作者已经突破了可以从现有传感器中学到的知识的局限，并以此为基础进行了有关技术在支持全球生物多样性监测工作中作用的全球讨论。

他们的创新研究帮助管理和保护了野生动植物，例如澳大利亚的座头鲸Megaptera novaeangliae（Bolin等，2020），南极洲的Weddell海豹Leptonychotes weddellii（LaRue等，2020），温带湖泊中的鱼类（Mouget等。2019）或亚马逊雨林中的蝙蝠（Torrent等人2018）。但是他们的工作也帮助制定了其他人考虑的监视方法的设计，通过提供他们从未使用过的技术和算法，为对未知领域有信心的人们提供了重要的指导。Duffy及其同事的贡献很好地体现了这一点（2018），他帮助人们理解在挑战性环境中使用轻型无人机时要考虑的一些关键问题；或Piña-Covarrubias及其同事（2019）的贡献，他们描述了优化传感器部署以在地面环境中进行声学检测和定位的方法。同样，Pasquarella及其同事（2016年）的工作帮助证明了如何利用所有可用的Landsat观测值的时间序列来绘制和监测生态系统的状态和动态，从而为环境管理者和生态系统生态学家提供了当前的前景。然后是Caravaggi和同事的评论（2017），这有助于识别当前和未来的机会，以利用相机诱捕技术来推进保护行为研究。

确保影响因素是同行评审期刊迈出的一大步，但最终，这项成就反映了整个社区的成就。从2014年开始创办期刊的决定到此时此刻，确实需要从众多人（作者，审稿人，编辑）的整体努力中获得信任，他们决定将时间和精力投入到新事物上，尽管无法保证退货。许多人冒着风险，并帮助我们发表了总体贡献，为有兴趣了解和推动全球监测和预测我们自然资本动态的科学家，管理人员，教育工作者和决策者提供了不可思议的资源。这种成功就是他们的成功。这本杂志的未来成功将取决于您。