Abstract

Ten years ago, a group of botanical and mycological taxonomists led by Dr Maaren Christenhusz (then at the Natural History Museum, London, UK) observed the early success of the mega-journal Zootaxa in helping zoological taxonomists rapidly document the world’s biodiversity (Zhang 2006a, b) and the contributions Zootaxa had made to the progress of descriptive taxonomy (Zhang 2008). They wanted to emulate the success of Zootaxa and proposed to me the possibility of establishing a sister journal, Phytotaxa, for their community. After a short period of discussion and preparation, Phytotaxa was launched officially in late October 2009 to accelerate the description of plant, algal, and fungal biodiversity (Christenhusz et al. 2009). In its first couple of years Phytotaxa quickly gained community acceptance (Christenhusz et al. 2011a; Christenhusz & Zhang 2011) and grew rapidly over the next three years (Esser & Zhang 2012; Zhang et al. 2013, 2014). Now, ten years later, I review the growth and success of Phytotaxa during its first decade, with a focus on the last five years.