In September of 2014,we held a successful editors' meeting and decided to establish awards of JSE Outstanding Papers as one of the strategies to improve the quality of JSE in the coming years (Ge & Wen,2015).The awards consist of two categories (i.e.,the JSE Outstanding Papers and JSE Young Investigators' Awards) and have been presented to the 20 most cited papers published in the period of 2008-2013,and four papers per year published in 2014 and 2015 to recognize the important impact of these papers in systematics and evolution (Ge & Wen,2015,2016).We herein announce the four papers to receive the two awards for 2016 and highlight the significance of these papers.