What’s in an ecosystem? New journal seeks to answer

In nature, when a space is cleared by fire or flood, there is an opportunity for reorganization and new development of an ecosystem. The same may be true for an emerging field of science, where a journal can be a substrate for primary succession of a discipline.

Visit the Ecosystems Web site.

That is the stated hope of Ecosystems, a new journal intended to be a focal point for original research, reviews, editorials and special features on ecosystem ecology, a decades-old field with a rich conceptual framework and strong information base, but no scholarly journal of its own.

Published by Springer-Verlag, the new peer-reviewed journal is co-edited by UW–Madison zoology Professors Monica G. Turner and Stephen R. Carpenter.

“Despite the steady development of ecosystem science, there has been no flagship journal devoted to the study and management of ecosystems,” Turner and Carpenter write in an editorial in the journal’s inaugural issue, to be published here this month. “Rather, the literature of ecosystem science has been dispersed among a variety of journals that either reflect broadly the discipline of ecology in all its facets or focus upon more specialized aspects of ecosystem-level ecology.”

The word ecosystem, Carpenter and Turner note, is among the ecological terms most familiar to the public, but awareness of the content of ecosystem science lags far behind the popularization of the term. The problem is compounded by the fact that much of the literature on ecosystem management is written by non-ecologists who sometimes struggle to reinvent basic concepts and knowledge arrived at long ago.

According to its co-editors, Ecosystems will be international in scope, will encourage submissions from all areas of ecosystem science, and will attempt to weave ecosystem ecology and other branches of ecology into one scholarly fabric.