Guide for authors

Aims and scope

SustainaTerra is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal publishing research on the links between agriculture, ecosystems, climate and livelihoods. It welcomes rigorous empirical studies, methodological and modelling work, systematic reviews and applied, policy-relevant research from all regions, in three sections:

• Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems: Focuses on farming practices that enhance productivity while conserving resources, ensuring food security, promoting rural livelihoods, and minimizing environmental impact. Includes agroecology, soil health, organic farming, and sustainable supply chains.
• Biodiversity Conservation and Natural Resource Management: Covers strategies and practices to protect ecosystems, wildlife, and genetic resources while promoting the sustainable use of forests, water bodies, and land. Includes habitat restoration, conservation policies, and community-based resource management.
• Environment and Climate change mitigation and adaptation: Addresses climate resilience, emission reductions, and adaptive strategies for communities and ecosystems. Includes renewable energy, carbon sequestration, disaster risk reduction, and environmental education.

The full scope of each section is described on the aims and scope page.

Article types

Choose the type that best fits your work when you submit. Word counts exclude references, tables and figure captions.

Contributions to a special issue use the same types; select the special issue in the submission form.

Peer review

SustainaTerra uses double-blind peer review: reviewers do not know who the authors are, and authors do not know who reviewed their work. Please make sure your manuscript file contains nothing that identifies you (see File format and anonymity).

1. Editorial check. The editors check scope, completeness and quality. Manuscripts outside the scope or not meeting basic standards may be declined without review.
2. Review. Suitable manuscripts are sent to independent experts in the field.
3. Decision. The handling editor decides (accept, minor revision, major revision or reject) based on the reports, and is responsible for the final decision.
4. Revision. Revised manuscripts include a point-by-point response to the reviewers and may be reviewed again.

Editors and reviewers declare any conflict of interest and do not handle manuscripts where one exists. Editors' own submissions are handled independently by another editor.

Special issues

Special issues collect articles on a focused theme, coordinated by guest editors and reviewed to the same standards as regular articles. Current calls are listed on the special issues page. To propose a special issue, write to editorial@sustainaterra.org.

Open access and fees

All articles are published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY 4.0): anyone can read, download, share and reuse them, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article processing charge: none. Submitting and publishing in SustainaTerra are free for authors. See open access and fees for details.

Ethics in publishing

SustainaTerra follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors, reviewers and editors are expected to act with honesty, transparency and respect for the work of others. Suspected misconduct is investigated following COPE procedures.

Research involving people, animals and fieldwork

People. Studies with human participants (including surveys, interviews and focus groups) need approval from an ethics committee or institutional review board, informed consent from participants, and protection of their confidentiality. State the approving body and reference number in the manuscript.

Animals. Follow national and international guidelines (for example, ARRIVE), state the institutional approval, and describe measures taken for animal welfare.

Fieldwork, communities and traditional knowledge. Obtain the permits required by local authorities and the consent of the communities involved, respect local customs, and acknowledge the source of traditional and indigenous knowledge. Collection or export of biological material must comply with applicable access and benefit-sharing rules.

Submission declaration

By submitting, the authors confirm that the work has not been published before (except as an abstract, thesis or preprint), is not under consideration by another journal, has been approved by all authors and, where needed, by the responsible authorities of the institution where it was carried out, and will not be published elsewhere in the same form if accepted.

Authorship

Everyone listed as an author should have:

• made a substantial contribution to the conception, design, data, analysis or interpretation of the work;
• drafted the article or revised it critically for important content;
• approved the final version; and
• agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

People who contributed but do not meet these criteria belong in the acknowledgements. Guest, gift and ghost authorship are not acceptable.

Contributions. Describe each author's role using the CRediT taxonomy (for example: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft).

Corresponding author. One author handles all communication with the journal during review and publication, makes sure every co-author has approved the submission and its revisions, and keeps them informed. The corresponding author's email and ORCID iD are required.

Group authorship. When a consortium or working group is an author, name the group and list its members in the acknowledgements or an appendix.

Changes to authorship. The author list and order should be final at submission. Any change (addition, removal or reordering) must be requested by the corresponding author before acceptance, with the reason and the written agreement of all authors, including anyone being added or removed. Changes after acceptance are made only in exceptional cases.

Competing interests

Declare any financial, professional or personal relationship that could be seen as influencing the work: funding, employment, consultancies, shareholdings, patents, or close relationships. If there are none, state: "The authors declare no competing interests."

Funding

List all sources of funding with grant numbers, and describe the role of the funders in study design, data collection, analysis, writing and the decision to publish. If the funders had no role, say so. If there was no specific funding, state that too.

Declaration of generative AI use

Not allowed:

• generating or rewriting scientific content, arguments, literature reviews, results or conclusions;
• analysing, generating or interpreting data;
• creating, altering or enhancing figures, images or tables (see Figures and tables);
• producing references or citations;
• listing an AI tool as an author or co-author.

Authors remain fully responsible for every part of the manuscript, including checking any wording an AI tool suggested.

How to declare. Add a section titled Declaration of generative AI use before the references, naming the tool and what it was used for:

If no AI tool was used, write: "No generative AI tools were used in the preparation of this manuscript."

Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts or reports to generative AI tools, as this breaks the confidentiality of peer review.

Preprints

If you have posted, or plan to post, a preprint of your manuscript, mention it in your cover letter with its link, and check with the editorial office at editorial@sustainaterra.org if you have any question.

Data and image integrity

Data, images and results must not be fabricated, falsified or selectively reported. Results should be reproducible from the methods described, and underlying data available to the editors on request.

Images. Do not enhance, obscure, move, remove or add any feature within an image. Adjusting brightness, contrast or colour balance is acceptable only if it is applied to the whole image and does not hide or create information. Keep the original files: the editors may ask for them.

Plagiarism and redundant publication

All submissions are screened with similarity-checking software. Copying text, data or ideas without attribution — including from your own earlier publications — is not acceptable. Submitting the same work to more than one journal at a time, or publishing substantially the same results twice, is redundant publication.

Inclusive language

Write with respect for all people. Avoid stereotypes and assumptions about readers or study participants based on gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, disability or socioeconomic status, and use the terms communities use for themselves. Report sex and gender where relevant to the research, and explain how they were defined.

Maps and territorial neutrality

SustainaTerra remains neutral on territorial and jurisdictional claims in published maps, place names and institutional affiliations. Authors are responsible for the boundaries and names shown; use internationally recognised sources where possible and cite the source of every map.

Corrections, retractions and withdrawal

Corrections. If you find an error in a published article, contact the editorial office promptly. Errors that do not affect the conclusions are corrected with a published correction notice.

Retractions. Articles with unreliable findings, serious ethical problems, plagiarism or data manipulation are retracted following COPE guidance; the retraction notice remains linked to the article.

Withdrawal. Authors may withdraw a manuscript before acceptance by writing to the editorial office with the agreement of all authors.

Language

Manuscripts are published in English (British or American spelling, used consistently). Write clearly and concisely; if English is not your first language, consider having the text checked before submission (see Language editing). Spell out abbreviations at first use.

File format and anonymity

• Submit the manuscript as an editable Word file (.docx), single column, with line and page numbers.
• Enter all author names, affiliations, the corresponding author's email and ORCID iDs in the submission form — not in the manuscript file.
• For double-blind review, remove names, affiliations, acknowledgements, funding details that identify you, and self-citations written in the first person ("in our previous study [3]" becomes "in a previous study [3]"). Also clear the author name from the file's document properties.
• Keep acknowledgements, funding and author contributions ready: you add them in the form and they are restored in the published article.

Article structure

Research articles generally follow this order (other types adapt it as described in Article types):

1. Title — concise and informative; avoid abbreviations.
2. Abstract — 150–250 words, stating the purpose, methods, main results and conclusions; no references.
3. Keywords — 4–6 terms that are not already in the title.
4. Highlights — see below.
5. Introduction — background, gap and objectives; no detailed literature survey or summary of results.
6. Materials and methods — enough detail to reproduce the work, including study area, sampling, analyses and software.
7. Results — clear and concise.
8. Discussion — significance of the results, comparison with other work, limitations.
9. Conclusions — main conclusions and implications, which may be part of the discussion.
10. Declarations — competing interests, funding, author contributions (CRediT), data availability, ethics approval, declaration of generative AI use, acknowledgements.
11. References.
12. Appendices — numbered A, B, …; their figures, tables and equations are numbered A.1, A.2, ….

Number sections 1, 2, 2.1, 2.1.1 and refer to them by number in the text. Use SI units.

Highlights and graphical abstract

Highlights are required: 3 to 5 bullet points, each under 85 characters including spaces, capturing the key findings.

A graphical abstract is optional but encouraged: a single image summarising the article, readable at small size (around 1,300 × 650 pixels), without a title or excessive text.

Mathematical formulae

Type equations with the Word equation editor (not as images). Number displayed equations consecutively in parentheses on the right, e.g. (1), and define every variable. Simple formulae within the text can be written inline, using the solidus (/) instead of horizontal fraction lines where possible.

Figures and tables

Placement and numbering. Cite every figure and table in the text in order. Place each one near its first mention in the manuscript and also upload figures as separate files.

Captions. Give each figure a caption below it and each table a title above it, explaining all symbols and abbreviations so it can be understood on its own.

Colour and legibility. Colour figures are published free of charge online. Use colour-blind-friendly palettes, keep text legible at final size, and state units on all axes.

Tables must be editable (not images), with no vertical rules and only essential horizontal ones.

Supplementary material

Additional tables, datasets, code, videos or appendices can be uploaded as supplementary files. They are published as supplied, without editing, so check them carefully. Refer to each one in the text (e.g. "Table S1", "Video S1"). Videos should be in MP4 format and kept short.

Research data

We encourage authors to share the data, code and materials supporting their results in a recognised repository (for example Zenodo, Dryad, Figshare or a discipline-specific repository) and to cite the dataset in the reference list.

Every research article includes a data availability statement saying where the data can be found, or why they cannot be shared (for example, confidentiality or third-party ownership).

Citations and references

Cite only works you have read and that are relevant; every citation must appear in the reference list and vice versa. Include the DOI for every reference that has one. A reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) makes switching to the numbered style quick.

List up to six authors, then "et al.". Cite software and datasets like other sources. Preprints may be cited when clearly identified as preprints; unpublished results and personal communications are mentioned in the text only.

How to submit

1. Create an author account or sign in.
2. Choose Submit a manuscript, select the journal section and article type, and complete the form: title, abstract, keywords, authors, affiliations and declarations.
3. Upload the anonymised manuscript, figures and any supplementary files.
4. Review the summary and submit. You receive a confirmation email with your manuscript number (e.g. SUST-26-000123) and can follow its progress in your author dashboard.

All correspondence goes to the corresponding author. Revised versions are submitted from the same dashboard, together with a point-by-point response to the reviewers.

Submission checklist

Use this list before you submit — 0 of 10 checked.

• The manuscript is within the scope of one of the journal's three sections.
• The manuscript file is anonymised: no author names, affiliations, acknowledgements or self-identifying references.
• All authors, affiliations, the corresponding author's email and ORCID iDs are entered in the submission form.
• Abstract (150–250 words), 4–6 keywords and 3–5 highlights are included.
• Figures and tables are cited in order, have captions, and figure files meet the resolution requirements.
• Every citation appears in the reference list and vice versa; DOIs are included where available.
• Declarations are complete: competing interests, funding, author contributions (CRediT), data availability, ethics approval if applicable.
• The declaration of generative AI use is included (or states that no AI tool was used).
• Permission has been obtained for any material reproduced from other sources.
• The manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere and all authors approved the submission.

Licence and copyright

Authors keep the copyright of their work. Articles are published under the CC BY 4.0 licence, which lets anyone share and adapt the article for any purpose, provided the authors and the original publication are credited.

Permission for copyrighted material

If you reproduce figures, tables or text that were published elsewhere, obtain written permission from the copyright holder for reuse under CC BY 4.0, and credit the source in the caption. Material that cannot be licensed this way should be replaced or redrawn.

Proofs

The corresponding author receives a link to review the typeset proof online. Use it to correct typesetting errors and answer the editors' queries; substantial changes to the content, results or author list are not possible at this stage. Please return your corrections by the deadline given in the email so that publication is not delayed.

Sharing your article

Once published, your article is freely available on SustainaTerra with its DOI, registered with Crossref. Share the link widely, add it to your ORCID record and institutional repository, and deposit the published version anywhere, in line with the CC BY 4.0 licence.

Language editing

If your manuscript would benefit from language editing, ask a fluent colleague or use a professional editing service before submission. Using an editing service is optional, is not required for acceptance and does not influence editorial decisions. Remember that generative AI tools may be used for grammar only, and must be declared.

Contact the editorial office

For questions about scope, submission, policies or a manuscript under review, write to editorial@sustainaterra.org. Include your manuscript number if you have one. Reviewers can find their own guidance in the guide for reviewers.