The vision for Ecological Monographs is that it should be the place for publishing integrative, synthetic papers that elaborate new directions for the field of ecology.
Original Research Papers published in Ecological Monographs will continue to document complex observational, experimental, or theoretical studies that by their very integrated nature defy dissolution into shorter publications focused on a single topic or message.
Reviews will be comprehensive and synthetic papers that establish new benchmarks in the field, define directions for future research, contribute to fundamental understanding of ecological principles, and derive principles for ecological management in its broadest sense (including, but not limited to: conservation, mitigation, restoration, and pro-active protection of the environment). Reviews should reflect the full development of a topic and encompass relevant natural history, observational and experimental data, analyses, models, and theory. Reviews published in Ecological Monographs should further blur the boundaries between “basic” and “applied” ecology.
Concepts and Synthesis papers will conceptually advance the field of ecology. These papers are expected to go well beyond works being reviewed and include discussion of new directions, new syntheses, and resolutions of old questions.
In this world of rapid scientific advancement and never-ending environmental change, there needs to be room for the thoughtful integration of scientific ideas, data, and concepts that feeds the mind and guides the development of the maturing science of ecology. Ecological Monographs provides that room, with an expansive view to a sustainable future.
Overview
The award-winning WIREs (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews) series combines some of the most powerful features of encyclopedic reference works and review journals in an innovative online format. They are designed to promote a cross-disciplinary research ethos while maintaining the highest scientific and presentational standards, but should be viewed first and foremost as evolving online databases of cutting-edge reviews.
WIREs Water
An important new forum to promote cross-disciplinary understanding of the water environment, and the severe challenges that it faces during the 21st Century
An authoritative, encyclopedic resource addressing key topics from the perspectives of earth sciences, biology, engineering, social sciences, and humanities
High-quality content commissioned from expert contributors and peer-reviewed to a rigorous standard
Content is fully citable, qualifying for abstracting, indexing, and ISI ranking
For more information, please go to wires.wiley.com/water.
Aims and Scope
The scope of WIREs Water is at the interfaces between five very different intellectual themes: the basic science of water, its physics and chemistry, flux, and things that it transfers and transforms; life in water, and the dependence of ecosystems and organisms on water to survive and to thrive; the engineering of water to furnish services and to protect society; the people who live with, experience and manage the water environment; and those interpretations that we, as a society, have brought to water through art, religion, history and which in turn shapes how we come to understand it. These interfaces are not simply designed to be ways of looking at water through what necessarily must be interdisciplinary perspectives. They are also designed to be outward facing in terms of how water can help to understand wider questions concerning our environment and human-environment interactions.
Topics:
Engineering Water
The contributions made by the engineering sciences to the ways in which we engineer and plan water: water, health and sanitation, including water supply, waste and disposal, infectious and waterborne diseases, public health, environmental standards: the sustainable engineering of water, including source protection, water conservation and recycling, resilience to natural hazards, waste and drainage systems, waterproofed urban landscapes, enhancing ecosystems through engineering; planning water including planning concepts, path dependency, retrodiction and prediction, forecasting, holistic analysis of water.
Human Water
Perspectives from the social sciences and humanities on our water condition: water governance, including decision-making processes, rules, customs, laws and accountability in water management; the value of water, including water pricing, more-than-economic valuation of water, hidden and embedded water (e.g. in energy, food), alternative definitions of the ‘clean’ and the ‘safe’; the rights to water, including distributive justice, entitlements and their definition, water conflicts across spatial scales; water as imagined and represented, in the creative arts, across world views, in memory and through communication.
Science of Water
The physics and chemistry of water: hydrological processes throughout the hydrological cycle; stocks and flows of water and the matter that it entrains, transports and deposits, at different spatial and temporal scales; water extremes in stocks and flows and there distributions in space and time; water quality, including solutes, sediment and temperature and its control by water flow pathways and transit times; water and environmental change, including climate, land use and flow regulation.
Water and Life
The ecology and biology of freshwater environments: the nature of freshwater ecosystems, including their structure and organisation, inter-connectivity, emergent properties, sensitivity and resilience; stresses and pressures on ecosystems, at the scales of species, habitats and ecosystems, and including multiple stressors; conservation, management and awareness including restoration, the analysis of ecosystem services, questions of spatial and temporal scale and public engagement with freshwater ecosystems.
Ecology Letters is a forum for the very rapid publication of the most novel research in ecology. Manuscripts relating to the ecology of all taxa, in any biome and geographic area will be considered, and priority will be given to those papers exploring or testing clearly stated hypotheses. The journal publishes concise papers that merit urgent publication by virtue of their originality, general interest and their contribution to new developments in ecology. We discourage purely descriptive papers and those merely confirming or extending results of previous work.
Global Ecology and Biogeography (GEB) welcomes papers that investigate broad-scale (in space, time and/or taxonomy), general patterns in the organization of ecological systems and assemblages, and the processes that underlie them. In particular, GEB welcomes studies that use macroecological methods, comparative analyses, meta-analyses, reviews, spatial analyses and modelling to arrive at general, conceptual conclusions. Studies in GEB need not be global in spatial extent, but the conclusions and implications of the study must be relevant to ecologists and biogeographers globally, rather than being limited to local areas, or specific taxa. Similarly, GEB is not limited to spatial studies; we are equally interested in the general patterns of nature through time, among taxa (e.g., body sizes, dispersal abilities), through the course of evolution, etc. Further, GEB welcomes papers that investigate general impacts of human activities on ecological systems in accordance with the above criteria.
Journal of Ecology publishes original research papers on all aspects of the ecology of plants (including algae), in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. We do not publish papers concerned solely with cultivated plants and agricultural ecosystems. Studies of plant communities, populations or individual species are accepted, as well as studies of the interactions between plants and animals, fungi or bacteria, providing they focus on the ecology of the plants.
We aim to bring important work using any ecological approach (including molecular techniques) to a wide international audience and therefore only publish papers with strong and ecological messages that advance our understanding of ecological principles.
Functional Ecology publishes high-impact papers that enable a mechanistic understanding of ecological pattern and process from the organismic to the ecosystem scale. Because of the multifaceted nature of this challenge, papers can be based on a wide range of approaches. Thus, manuscripts may vary from physiological, genetics, life-history, and behavioural perspectives for organismal studies to community and biogeochemical studies when the goal is to understand ecosystem and larger scale ecological phenomena. We believe that the diverse nature of our journal is a strength, not a weakness, and we are open-minded about the variety of data, research approaches and types of studies that we publish. Certain key areas will continue to be emphasized: studies that integrate genomics with ecology, studies that examine how key aspects of physiology (e.g., stress) impact the ecology of animals and plants, or vice versa, and how evolution shapes interactions among function and ecological traits. Ecology has increasingly moved towards the realization that organismal traits and activities are vital for understanding community dynamics and ecosystem processes, particularly in response to the rapid global changes occurring in earth’s environment, and Functional Ecology aims to publish such integrative papers.
ECOGRAPHY publishes papers focused on broad spatial and temporal patterns, particularly studies of population and community ecology, macroecology, biogeography, and ecological conservation.
Journal of Applied Ecology publishes novel, high-impact papers on the interface between ecological science and the management of biological resources.The editors encourage contributions that use applied ecological problems to test and develop basic theory, although there must be clear potential for impact on the management of the environment.
Diversity and Distributions is a journal of conservation biogeography. We publish papers that deal with the application of biogeographical principles, theories, and analyses (being those concerned with the distributional dynamics of taxa and assemblages) to problems concerning the conservation of biodiversity. We no longer consider papers the sole aim of which is to describe or analyze patterns of biodiversity or to elucidate processes that generate biodiversity.
Ecology publishes articles that report on the basic elements of ecological research. Emphasis is placed on concise, clear articles documenting important ecological phenomena. The journal publishes a broad array of research that includes a rapidly expanding envelope of subject matter, techniques, approaches, and concepts: paleoecology through present-day phenomena; evolutionary, population, physiological, community, and ecosystem ecology, as well as biogeochemistry; inclusive of descriptive, comparative, experimental, mathematical, statistical, and interdisciplinary approaches.