Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Putting applied ecology into practice

2010; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1365-2664.2009.01757.x

1365-2664

Jane Memmott, Marc W. Cadotte, Philip E. Hulme, Gill Kerby, E.J. Milner‐Gulland, Mark J. Whittingham,

Forest Management and Policy

In 2005, an editorial was published in the Journal that addressed the changing emphasis and direction of applied ecology (Freckleton et al. 2005). This editorial proposed that the Journal should increasingly target papers that would have direct relevance to ecological management and policy while maintaining a strong link to basic ecological concepts and theories. These core aspects are still true 5 years later, but with expanding areas of research and new management challenges; today more than ever the Journal must reach out and offer real insight and options for management. The aims of this new editorial are to outline to authors and reviewers the key attributes that form the basis of the papers published in the Journal of Applied Ecology and to announce new developments in line with our strategic vision for the journal at the start of a new decade. The Journal's critical role in influencing policy is emphasized by the looming deadline of the Convention on Biological Diversity which set the target of significantly reducing biodiversity loss by 2010. A number of ecological audits assessing biodiversity loss have taken place, for example, the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment examined the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and concluded that, worldwide, 60% of ecosystem services had been degraded. Other assessments are in progress, for example, the National Ecosystem Assessment will provide the first analysis of the UK's natural environment in terms of the benefits it provides to society. These targets and audits are not environmental niceties; rather as stated by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2005 'Failure to conserve and use biological diversity in a sustainable manner would result in degrading environments, new and more rampant illnesses, deepening poverty and a continued pattern of inequitable and untenable growth'. Put practically: biodiversity matters, it matters to the rich and to the poor, to the developed and to the developing world. Applied ecologists are a crucial part of a multi-disciplinary group engaged in managing human use of the environment to prevent Kofi Annan's vision from materializing. Working proactively with environmental managers, collaborating with colleagues in the social and physical sciences, and holding two-way conversations with policy makers and the public are all in the job description of the modern applied ecologist. The Journal of Applied Ecology is one of the most highly ranked international journals in its field, with a reputation for publishing papers that combine the highest standards of ecological science with direct relevance to environmental management. Our remit is extremely large. Thus, we publish research on animal, microbial and plant taxa across a broad range of habitats and ecosystems, and these papers span observational, experimental and theoretical studies. With the dramatic growth of applied ecological research in the last decade, the Journal needs to refine its scope to ensure we retain our distinct identity among ecology journals. To help potential authors identify whether their paper is suitable for the journal, we have described below the types of papers we accept for publication. Our acceptance rate is challenging (14·5% in 2008) and authors need to be confident that their study fits our remit before submission. As examples of good practice, we use papers that proved particularly influential or that were selected as the Editor's choice. Editor's choice is a new initiative begun in 2008 and is used as a means of highlighting papers that are, especially timely, particularly high quality and meet our key criteria of ecological studies with management relevance. All Journal of Applied Ecology papers cover ecology with management relevance, i.e. they present research that has direct relevance to environmental management. However, papers focused solely on the specifics of management in a particular location, without taking into account ecological dynamics and interactions or providing more general lessons, do not fit the Journal's mandate to advance scientific understanding of applied ecological problems. Conversely, ecological papers that do not have a clear and direct relevance to the management of ecosystems and/or biodiversity are outside our remit. To highlight the applied importance of everything that we publish, we place a great deal of emphasis on the 'Synthesis and Applications' point of the abstract, where the management implications of the paper must be laid out clearly and convincingly. An example of where research has truly integrated basic ecological science with an applied problem is Kilpatrick, Gillin & Daszak (2009) whose work on the risk of transmission of Brucellosis from bison to cattle clearly demonstrates how good science can inform practical management. They do this by using a model that integrated epidemiological and ecological data to determine the spatio-temporal relative risk of transmission of Brucella from bison to cattle under different scenarios. They then used their data to outline two strategies for managing this risk of transmission and they discussed the consequences of the current adaptive management plan. A continuing weakness in applied ecology is the lack of papers that have actually tested management recommendations in the field. Thus, analysing a problem, offering a management solution and then implementing that solution and testing its efficacy in an adaptive management approach. The vast majority of papers published in the peer-reviewed literature, including our journal, fall short of this ideal, stopping at the point of offering a management solution. Greater collaboration with applied practitioners will provide the fastest and most effective way to ensure that papers genuinely contribute to management in the real world; a good example of this approach is Carvell et al. (2007). Here, the co-authors form a team of government scientists, a university academic and a practitioner who runs a wildlife farming company, with the latter training farmers to implement the management recommendations made in the paper. This training is delivered via collaboration with the government agencies that manage the agri-environment schemes, as well as major industry partners in the food and farming sectors (e.g. http://www.operationbumblebee.co.uk). The papers coming out of academic : practitioner collaborations will have solid, empirically validated results of direct and broad relevance to both ecological science and ecological practice. Within the remit of an ecologically based paper with management relevance, a typical Journal of Applied Ecology paper falls into one of the three categories below: A data or modelling paper that is the definitive one in its area, or a pioneer in a new area. Specifically, these are high-quality data papers that significantly advance the field using a sophisticated or substantial sampling protocol. These have become the definitive paper in their subject area, for example Hendrickx et al. (2007) ask how landscape, land use and habitat diversity affect arthropod diversity in agricultural systems by sampling bees, beetles, hoverflies, true bugs and spiders at 24 field sites across seven countries. Some data papers that make significant contributions to the field may not necessarily be as robust with regard to sampling protocols (often due to major practical constraints), but nonetheless form the pioneering contributions to a contentious or novel area. The Journal welcomes Review papers. When submitting these, authors need to consider whether they provide a synthesis of ideas that includes new insights not evident in the individual papers under consideration. Thus, a review paper needs to be much more than a thorough compilation of the literature. Forum papers that succinctly challenge received wisdom in environmental management and policy and/or raise issues where new perspectives are required or where conflicts are evident. These articles stimulate dialogue between ecologists and managers or ecologists and policy makers, for example, the recent forum on the management of raptor predation on UK grouse moors (Redpath & Thirgood 2009; Sotherton, Tapper & Smith 2009; Thompson et al. 2009). Some of our most influential papers fall into the Forum category and thereby help to set future research agendas. Other good examples are Palmer et al. (2005) who propose criteria for assessing the success of river restoration schemes, Sutherland et al. (2006) who identify 100 questions of high policy relevance, and Hulme et al. (2008) who propose a framework to assist the comparative analysis and regulation of invasions by a wide range of taxa. While somewhat of a niche market in our submissions, publishing the BES lecture at the BES Annual Meeting enables the journal to publicize the ideas of some of the most influential thinkers in environmental policy. These include the papers by Beringer (2000) and Gray (2004) on genetic modification, King (2005) on climate change, Lawton (2007) tackling the challenges at the policy:science interface, and Dasgupta (2007) addressing environmental economics. With the launch of the new BES journal, Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE; see http://www.methodsinecologyandevolution.org), purely methodological papers that do not significantly advance applied or conservation science, will be returned with a recommendation to submit to MEE. Although the Journal requires papers to be relevant to the discipline of ecology, we welcome interdisciplinary contributions, given that the management of natural systems will not succeed without contributions from a range of disciplines. For example, applied management and policy considerations may rely as much on decision-theory or economics as ecological processes. A case in point is the threat of biological invasions where there are clear links between economic development, national income and trade and the numbers of invasive species in a particular region (Hulme 2009). We are a forward thinking journal and areas where we would like to see more papers include: the linked ecological and economic dynamics of ecosystem services, combating emerging infectious diseases, the costs and benefits of intense management activities to combat the effects of global change, and approaches to decision-making about the management of natural systems. Authors need to consider carefully whether their work really does represent a major advance. In particular, papers on agri-environmental schemes, road impacts and population models for rare species in particular locations need to represent a particularly large step forward when compared with previous papers in these fields. Finally, we are no longer looking for papers assessing the value of grasslands for livestock production, forests for timber yield or the role of management on soil nutrient fluxes unless they address ecological processes of relevance to biodiversity and conservation. Given that the solution to many environmental problems will involve numerous parties, applied ecologists need to engage as wide an audience as possible with their research. We do this in a range of ways, including dissemination in the traditional media, as well as workshops, conferences and the papers we publish (particularly Forum articles). We are increasingly using our online resources to engage the wider public, such as RSS, twitter, and online commentaries such as Editor's choice. While publishing a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology places the work in the international research arena, the journal also gets excellent coverage from the media, possibly the best of any ecological journal. Considering just the last 2 years, four papers have attracted a significant amount of media attention. These are: Bergstrom et al. (2009) on the trophic cascade which followed the removal of cats from Macquarie Island; Devereux, Denny & Whittingham (2008) on the impact of turbine location on the distribution of four functional groups of wintering farmland birds; Epstein et al. (2009) working on the fruit bat, Pteropus vampyrus, who demonstrated that current hunting rates are unsustainable; and Dawson & Efford (2009) using a new acoustic method to census cryptic species. Engaging the public, policy makers and politicians in any aspect of applied ecology is key to solving many environmental problems. When an article is accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Ecology we encourage authors to engage with the media and we can provide advice and support on that process. As a journal, we have both long and short-term strategic objectives which we meet using a variety of approaches. A key strategic aim of the Journal is to increase both the authorship and readership of the journal from Asia, and we are working proactively to achieve this. For example, to coincide with two major scientific meetings in China (the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Beijing and the International Congress on Biological Invasions in Fuzhou), we published two online virtual issues giving free access to the best of our papers over the last 5 years relevant to each meeting. We also compiled a Special Profile on conservation in China in the June 2009 issue of the journal to coincide with these meetings, and we distributed information and contents lists in Chinese, both via email campaigns and directly to delegates. We are actively seeking to recruit leading applied ecologists in Asia to our team of Associate Editors. Another strategic aim is that we intend to be more than a high-impact journal that acts as a repository for quality ecological papers with management relevance. Rather, we also aim to facilitate the channels of communication between applied ecologists, from academic to practitioner and vice versa. An editorial in Nature in 2007 (Anonymous 2007) discussed the 'yawning implementation gap' between academic conservation biologists and conservation practitioners. The editorial described how the practitioners who actually carry out conservation work have no access to the applied ecology journals where conservation academics publish their research. Moreover, these papers are written in such a style as to render them unintelligible to people other than fellow conservation academics. The advice from the editorial was for the two groups to 'get out of their respective ruts, open up paths of communication, share information and seek ever more efficient means to a common end'. The Journal has started three new ventures to meet this challenge. We held the first of what we hope will be a series of related conference workshops at the Society of Conservation Biology's 2009 annual meeting in Beijing, where a large number of academics and conservation practitioners gather, entitled 'Improving the conservation impact of scientific publishing'. Given our strategic focus on Asia, this was a particularly useful venue to hold the workshop, which was extremely well attended and positively received. Acknowledging that the implementation gap is an issue that concerns all the journals in the field of conservation and applied ecology, and their publishers, the panellists included representatives from several leading journals and online resources, as well as from Wiley-Blackwell. The workshop was co-organized by one of our Editors and the Editor of Oryx, and more details about the subjects discussed and the next steps we intend to take as a group to address the problem are in Milner-Gulland et al. (2010). Future areas where we hope to target such efforts include the management of biological invasions where, even in this relatively new discipline, the disparity between science output and practical implementation has long been recognized (Hulme 2003). We have also initiated a series of conferences in the UK that use a 'Think Global, Act Local' approach. Rather than using the traditional conference approach of inviting eminent ecological academics from around the world, our underlying rationale is to get local conservation academics talking to local conservation practitioners with the aim of forging collaborative projects. Academics are often on the lookout for field sites and field interventions for use by their research group; also many funding bodies need a practical partner on board. Moreover, academics can find out what individuals in charge of implementing management consider the key threats to the integrity of ecosystems and what they consider to be the most effective management solutions. These may be different to the opinions of academic conservation practitioners. Practitioners gain by having a collaborator who can bring them up to date with the latest scientific developments and translate the scientific jargon into everyday language. While these conferences started in the UK, the plan is to run them internationally. Another new initiative starts this year and consists of a series of papers called 'Practitioners' Perspectives'. Here, key practitioners are invited to contribute their viewpoints on species conservation, ecosystem restoration, pest management and the mitigation of environmental threats to biodiversity. These short articles will act as a platform for individuals involved in hands-on management of ecological resources, be they species, ecosystems or landscapes, to present their personal views on the direction of applied ecological research. The articles will usually be commissioned by invitation from the Editorial board, but if authors are interested in submitting this type of manuscript, please contact the editorial office. Finally, one of our key aims and one that mirrors a strategic aim of the British Ecological Society, is to build ecological capacity around the world. With an eye on investing in the future, we offer an annual prize for young authors – The Southwood Prize – with recent recipients from the USA, UK, Mexico, South Africa and Spain. Increasingly, scientific publishing is becoming influenced by citation metrics with authors selecting journals for publishing their best work on the basis of impact factors. While the Journal certainly holds its own in these respects, as scientists we must not forget that our research should have a wider and long-lasting impact. Moreover, research assessment bodies are increasingly becoming cognisant of 'impact' and the initiatives posed above are likely to make the Journal a world leader in bridging the gap between academic science and delivery where new knowledge is needed. The editorial team is committed to ensuring the work we publish can contribute to a change for the better in the natural environment. While we manage rising numbers of papers submitted to the journal, our roles extend beyond the management of manuscripts and referees to take the research to a wider audience. We hope we can encourage you to contribute to this mission as authors, referees, editors and/or readers and together we will make a difference.