Ecological Applications
ISSN 1051-0761 Eight times per year
Mission
Scope
Types of Contributions
Board of Editors
new policy on Communications
enhanced - access - color
Mission Statement: Ecological Applications is concerned broadly with the applications of ecological science to environmental problems. It publishes papers that develop scientific principles to support environmental decision-making, as well as papers that discuss the application of ecological concepts to environmental issues, policy, and management. Papers may report on experimental tests, actual applications, scientific decision support techniques, economic analyses, social implications of environmental issues, or other relevant topics. Statistical or experimental methods papers that support research and applications are welcome. Papers submitted to Ecological Applications should be accessible to both scholars and practitioners.
The pages of Ecological Applications are open to research and discussion papers that integrate ecological science and concepts with their application and implications. Of special interest are papers that develop the basic scientific principles on which environmental decision-making should rest, and those that discuss the application of ecological concepts to environmental problem solving, policy, and management. Papers that deal explicitly with policy matters are welcome. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, as are short communications on emerging environmental challenges. The journal invites manuscripts describing individual case studies that have the potential to form the basis of broader theories and concepts. However, routine discussions of particular environmental problems, and site- and species-specific research results, will be considered only if they are placed successfully in a more general context. Papers describing new methods or techniques can be published only if they describe truly new and significant advances in methodology that can be broadly applied to the understanding or management of environmental problems. Inevitably, there will be some overlap in subject matter with Ecology; however, papers submitted to Ecological Applications should explicitly discuss the applications or implications of the work with regard to policy, management, or the analysis and solution of major environmental problems.
Ecological Applications invites contributions from scientists, policy makers, and managers concerned with the full spectrum of ecological applications. Included within this spectrum are global climate change and biogeochemistry, conservation biology, ecotoxicology and pollution ecology, fishery and wildlife ecology, forestry, agroecosystems, range management, soils, hydrology and groundwater, landscape ecology, and epidemiology.
Types of contributions
Authors please take note of the style shift at Ecological Applications.
Articles. Articles describing significant original research comprise the core of the journal. Articles may not exceed 60 manuscript pages (double-spaced, 12-point font, including everything from Title Page through the last figure). Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words. Articles exceeding 60 manuscript pages may be considered for Ecological Monographs at the discretion of the editor-in-chief .
Communications. Shorter papers (up to 8 journal pages) of immediate impact in fast-moving scientific debate or urgent practical application. These papers will be fast-tracked through the editorial, review and production processes so as to make possible a relatively rapid publication. These papers must be accompanied by a cover letter clearly indicating that the paper is being submitted for consideration for the Communications section and explaining why the paper warrants this special treatment. Submissions should be a maximum of 20 double-spaced manuscript pages, including tables, figures, etc. Abstracts are a maximum of 200 words. Papers deemed unsuitable for Communications may be considered for publication as regular articles.
Invited Features. Invited Features are intended to address various aspects of a theme that is likely to be of broad interest to applied ecologists. Ideally, a feature should inform a broad audience about an unfamiliar topic or an area in which there has been considerable recent progress, or it should cause the audience to re-examine an issue that is not as settled as most have presumed. Proposals for Invited Features should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief. Additional advice and instructions are available which explain how to propose and prepare Invited Features.
Forums. Ecological Applications occasionally publishes Forums. A Forum can take a number of forms but always includes a series of commentaries solicited from a number of experts. These commentaries represent personal responses to a paper (or papers) considered to be of very broad interest and significance within the field of applied ecology. Special instructions are available.
Letters to the Editor (up to 4 journal pages). Letters to the Editor point out errors of fact or interpretation in, or otherwise comment on, articles that previously appeared in ESA journals, or in articles or books that are the basis of numerous articles published in ESA journals. Submissions must contain no more than 16 manuscript pages. Special procedures have been established for preparation and review of Letters to the Editor and responses to Letters.
Questions to guide the prospective author
Ecological Applications publishes papers across the full spectrum of applications of ecological science, covering all types of organisms and environments. At the same time, it publishes a limited number of pages per year. Consequently, the journal can only publish the very best and most significant papers. Many papers that would be publishable in journals with a narrower disciplinary, taxonomic, or geographic scope may not be publishable in Ecological Applications.
Ecological Applications seeks to publish papers that will be interesting to a diverse audience including readers from many different subdisciplines of ecology, as well as from related disciplines. Given the focus of the journal on applications of ecological science to environmental problems, readers also include land managers, environmental consultants, ecologists with state and federal agencies, ecologists working for industry, and many others who are not necessarily heavily involved in doing research themselves. It is essential that papers published in Ecological Applications be oriented toward this broad audience, both in terms of addressing important and widespread problems and in clearly explaining how results from particular locations or on particular species may apply more broadly.
Given these and related considerations, here are some questions that authors should ask themselves before submitting a manuscript to Ecological Applications. The acceptance rate for manuscripts submitted to ESA journals is only about 30%. The purpose of these questions is to help prospective authors determine the chances that a manuscript will fall in the group that is original and important enough to be accepted. It may take six months or longer for a decision, so if these questions raise substantial doubts about whether a manuscript satisfies these specified criteria, a lot of time might be saved by submitting it to a more specialized journal.
- Is your manuscript so original and important that it warrants publication in a journal that can only publish one or a few papers per issue in any particular subdiscipline (e.g., conservation biology, biogeochemistry, agroecology, toxicology), or is it better suited for a more specialized journal?
- Does your manuscript focus on the application of ecological science to the understanding, management, or solution of environmental problems, or is the primary motivation and focus related to basic understanding of ecological phenomena? In manuscripts submitted to Ecological Applications, it is appropriate for the Introduction to focus primarily on the environmental issue(s) being addressed rather than on more fundamental issues.
- Does your manuscript address an environmental issue of widespread importance, or is the issue merely of local or limited importance? A manuscript covering a topic of local importance is better suited for a journal with a limited geographic scope.
- If your manuscript primarily reports on site- or species- specific results, do these results have broader implications (e.g., for other systems) and have you successfully explained how your results may offer insights to scientists or managers who are not necessarily interested in your particular system?
- Is your manuscript likely to be of interest and relevance only to a limited audience with training in a particular technical field, or will it appeal to a broad audience? This is a particularly crucial question for manuscripts that report new methods or approaches.
rev. 4/7/08
