Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America最新文献

Samuel Joseph McNaughton passed away peacefully at his home in Syracuse, NY on January 18, 2024. He is survived by Margaret McNaughton, his wife of 64 years, his two children, Sean (daughter-in-law Catherine) and Erin, and six grandchildren, Martine, Joshua, Shelby, Eli, Grace, and Esther.

Sam was born in Takoma Park, Md, but, in his own words, “fished, trapped, and hunted his way through much of his childhood in northwest Missouri.” After falling in love in high school, Sam and Margaret together attended Northwest Missouri State University (NWMSU), where Sam planned to study agriculture to continue the family business of farming. But while at NWMSU, he enrolled in a plant ecology course taught by Dr. Irene Mueller (a J. E. Weaver student) who helped Sam understand the patterns that had piqued his interest during his romps through nature. As part of the course, students read and critically discussed primary literature, which may have been Sam's initiation to curiosity-driven scientific investigation. This one course was ground-shifting for Sam, causing a pivot from agriculture to an interest in studying ecology, and probably instilled in him a deep appreciation for the importance of teaching, which he would carry throughout his academic career.

After graduating, Sam decided to work with Calvin McMillan at the University of Texas, Austin, which had one of the only climate-controlled plant growth facilities available at the time. He earned his Ph.D. in 1964 at the precocious age of 25, after which he spent 1 year as an Assistant Professor at Portland State University and 1 year as a postdoc at Stanford University, before starting his 38-year-long academic post at Syracuse University (SU) in 1966.

Sam's early scholarly work spanning his Ph.D. through the mid-1970s at SU focused on plant ecotypic variation, for which he used Typha as a study organism. His investigations examined the variation in production, phenotypic traits, and photosynthetic and respiratory biochemistry among populations of Typha throughout the midwestern and western United States. Because Typha overwhelmingly dominates communities, Sam's interpretations of his results spanned ecophysiological adaptation to whole community organization, a theme that would characterize his future influential studies of grassland ecosystems. His first four papers on Typha were published in 1965 and 1966 in Science (McNaughton 1965), Nature (McNaughton 1966a, b), and Ecological Monographs (McNaughton 1966c) demonstrating two features of Sam's science. First, his remarkable productivity, which Larry Wolf, a longtime friend and colleague at SU, explained by Sam's ability to very quickly produce a draft of a manuscript that would require very little further work before submission. One of us (MO) was eye-witness to this while a graduate student in the McNaughton l

These photographs illustrate the article “Refrigerated flowers in the torrid Mediterranean summer” by Carlos M. Herrera published in Ecology 105: e4268. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4268

The Ecological Society of America has been publishing journals for more than 100 years. Our distinguished ESA family of journals includes the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, first published in 1917, Ecology (1920), Ecological Monographs (1931), Ecological Applications (1991), Frontiers in Ecology and Environment (2003), Ecosphere (2010), and the newest journal, Earth Stewardship (2023). The ESA journals offer high-quality options for presenting scientific findings for all ecological topics. In 2022, our journals published 1,034 new papers, and the cumulative number of papers downloaded was more than 5.7 million. The acceptance rate for Ecology, Ecological Applications, and Ecosphere ranges from 20 to 49%, and the time length from submission to acceptance averages 155 days. The ESA journal acceptance rates are higher than Global Change Biology and Nature, and comparable to Limnology & Oceanography and Limnology & Oceanography Letters. Time to acceptance is longer than Global Change Biology, shorter than Nature, and similar to the aquatic journals.

Authors weigh multiple considerations when choosing a journal in which to publish, including prestige and impact factors, exposure to the most appropriate scientific audience through prolific use of social media, value of peer reviews, professional quality of the finished product, and speed of publishing. Beyond these important practical considerations, there is an additional value of publishing with ESA as a non-profit professional society. Several essays have recently called attention to the value of publishing in professional society journals rather than journals that support commercial publishing companies' bottom lines (Cloern 2023, Glibert 2023, Thorp 2023). An important message of these essays is that the financial returns from publishing in society-sponsored journals benefit the broader scientific community, not only shareholders in a for-profit corporation.

Some of our members question why ESA partners with Wiley, a commercial publisher, rather than self-publishing as ESA did for most of its history. Like many other professional societies, ESA recognized years ago that self-publishing was no longer financially feasible in an ever-expanding market. Partnership with Wiley in 2016 helped stabilize ESA's financial model. The ESA continues to study the publishing landscape to ensure its publishing practices remain contemporary, and future partnerships with other publishers may be considered.

The continued emergence of open-access journals and mandates to publish open-access papers are dramatically changing the scientific publishing landscape, and the ESA will continue to evolve with these changes. Researchers have an ever-increasing buffet of journal choices when they look for a place to publish. In addition

These photographs illustrate the article “Natal dispersal and exploratory forays through atypical habitat in the mountain-bound snow leopard,” published by Örjan Johansson, Justine Shanti Alexander, Purevjav Lkhagvajav, Charudutt Mishra, and Gustaf Samelius in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4264

These photographs illustrate the article “Natural Vegetation Biomass and the Dimension of Forest Quality in Tropical Agricultural Landscapes” by Renato Miazaki de Toledo*, Vania Regina Pivello, Michael Philip Perring, Luciano Martins Verdade published in Ecological Applications. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2950

These photographs illustrate the article “Cougars, wolves, and humans drive a dynamic landscape of fear for elk” by Taylor R. Ganz, Melia T. DeVivo, Aaron J. Wirsing, Sarah B. Bassing, Brian N. Kertson, Savanah L. Walker, Laura R. Prugh published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4255

These photographs illustrate the article “Thresholds and alternative states in a neotropical dry forest in response to fire severity” by H.R. Peinetti, B.T. Bestelmeyer, C.C. Chirino, F.L. Vivalda and A.G. Kin published in Ecological Applications. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2937

These photographs illustrate the article “Wandering outside of the Styx: Surface activity of an iconic subterranean vertebrate, the olm (Proteus anguinus)” by Raoul Manenti, Matteo Riccardo Di Nicola, Veronica Zampieri, Giorgio Grassi, Thomas Creanza, Edgardo Mauri, Gentile Francesco Ficetola, and Benedetta Barzaghi published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4252

Conducting fieldwork, or collecting data in an outdoor setting, is a common experience for many in ecology. While fieldwork inherently requires training in data collection methodology, field ecology often requires knowledge of social, cultural, organizational, and other practical skills that are not associated with the scientific method but are just as critical to an ecologist's success and well-being in a field setting. These skills are not readily recognized for their importance in fieldwork and are not developed with the same attention as those typically associated with research, such as proficiency with sampling equipment. However, this approach can negatively impact both the research itself and experience of ecologists, especially for those new to the field.

To address this gap, nine field ecologists from varied backgrounds gave presentations in a session focused on providing fieldwork advice during the 107^th Ecological Society Annual Meeting in Montréal, Québec, Canada. The primary goal for this session was for speakers to share practical lessons and advice learned from their own experiences. The speakers shared skills they wished they had learned prior to conducting fieldwork and how they navigated assumptions around physical, mental, and social expectations in the field. In addition, they discussed how they overcame deficits in knowledge considered “commonplace” by those with experience in the outdoors, as well as other personal and professional barriers to conducting successful fieldwork in ecology. By doing so, the speakers aimed to address and minimize barriers to ecologists beginning their careers, especially those who have limited or no experience preparing for fieldwork, and for whom fieldwork may present unique challenges. The content of the presentations is summarized by the participating speakers in the following sections, with points addressed during the audience “Question and Answer” portion of the session reviewed in the discussion section.

In their talk, Dr. Ezra Kottler discusses some of the specific challenges faced by transgender and gender-nonconforming scientists in doing fieldwork safely. They note that, while there have been important strides made in gender parity in ecology thanks to the trailblazing work of many amazing women ecologists, our field is only beginning to acknowledge and address the experiences of queer ecologists who do not fit into the gender binary. Ezra's expertise on this issue comes from personal experience, as halfway through their PhD program they came out as transgender and nonbinary and began to use a new name and pronouns. Being the first transgender scientist in many of the research settings they worked in, they had to do a lot of self-advocacy to access resources and supports they needed to succeed in their graduate program. They are now working to lessen barriers for all transgender field scientists through the Trans and Gender-nonconforming Fieldwork Alliance.

Conrad Istock was an important contributor to the emerging field of evolutionary ecology starting in the 1960s. His best-known work in this area blended theory and field and laboratory studies of pitcher-plant mosquitoes. Conrad died March 8, 2023, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

Conrad Alan Istock was born August 31, 1936, and grew up in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, USA, along with one sister and two brothers. During childhood, Conrad was shy, but he sang in the church choir along with his mother, took up playing the violin, which became a lifelong passion, and was an enthusiastic Boy Scout, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. He loved the outdoors and his troop's camping trips further stimulated his lifelong fascination with nature.

Conrad matriculated at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit in the fall of 1954. His circuitous path through college makes his career as a biologist seem far from inevitable. He first enrolled in the College of Engineering. In the winter of 1956, he transferred to the pre-education curriculum in the College of Liberal Arts and then in the winter of 1957 to the College of Education as a “science” major. He intended to be a high school teacher. It was not until the spring of 1956, his fourth semester in college, that he took “General Biology,” which was his first course in biology. He took one biology course in each of the following four semesters. As he entered his last year of college in the fall of 1958, only five of the forty-three courses he had taken were in biology. His last year was different, as six of his nine courses were biology. We describe below what sparked this change. In his last semester, he transferred back to the College of Liberal Arts and became a biology major. He graduated in June 1959 with a B.A.

Conrad's undergraduate years must have been especially stimulating for two reasons. The first is that the Biology Department at Wayne served students having a great diversity of educational goals. This is reflected in the courses it offered, which included Bacteriology, Comparative Anatomy, Endocrinology, Histology, Immunology, Invertebrate Zoology, and Ornithology, as well as courses such as Antiseptics and Disinfectants, Microbiology for Contract Nurses, Industrial Microbiology, and Scientific Aspects of Disease Control for students entering healthcare and public-health professions. The second reason is that the number of matriculated students increased from 11,293 in 1945–1946 to 26,556 in 1955–1956 (Hanawalt 1968:360) and the operating budget increased from 4.3 million dollars in 1945–1946 to 16.5 million dollars in 1955–1956 (Hanawalt 1968:370). Both increases must have contributed to a sense at Wayne of growth and of optimism about the future, which we believe inspired Conrad. Despite setbacks and disappointments (see below), this optimism never left him.

Inside the classroom, Conrad received a broad education in biology.