The “Recent advancements in the risk screening of freshwater and terrestrial non-native species” Special Issue in the open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal NeoBiota is now open for submissions. The deadline for submission is 30 April 2022, with the issue scheduled for publication in August 2022.
The “Recent advancements in the risk screening of freshwater and terrestrial non-native species” Special Issue in the open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal NeoBiotais now open for submissions.
Update: The deadline for submission has been extended to 30 April 2022, with the issue expected to be published in August 2022.
The new special issue is expected to collate prominent contributors from the field of invasive ecology, thereby addressing existing gaps in the knowledge about both freshwater and terrestrial non-native species and their management.
The editors note that despite the current efforts and measures to monitor and tackle the spread of non-native species, and especially those posing imminent threat to local biodiversity and ecosystems, further expansion of such populations has increasingly been recorded in recent years. Of special concern are developing countries, where legislation for controlling non-native species is still lacking.
A major problem is that – as of today – we are still missing on risk screening studies needed to provide evidence for the invasiveness potential of many non-native species across several taxonomic groups, which would then be used to support specific conservation efforts. Unfortunately, this is particularly true for species inhabiting the world’s biodiversity hotspots, point out the editors.
Risk-based identification of non-native species is an essential process to inform policy and actions for conservation and management of biodiversity. Previously published papers on risk screening of aquatic non-native species, and especially those using the most widely-employed ‘-ISK’ decision-support toolkits, have attracted mounting interest from the wider scientific community.
In Pakistan, amphibians have long been neglected in wildlife conservation, management decisions and research agendas. To counter this, scientists have now published the first comprehensive study on all known amphibian species in the country in the open-access scholarly journal ZooKeys. The little we currently know about the occurrence of the chytrid fungus, which has already eradicated many amphibian species globally, is a grim example of how urgent it is to acquire further information.
Amphibians are bioindicators of an ecosystem’s health and may also serve as biological control of crop and forest pests. The First Herpetological Congress, organized in 1989, presented alarming findings about the decline in amphibian populations. Currently, amphibians include the highest percentage of threatened species (>40%), as well as the highest number of data deficient species (>1500 species). The little we currently know about the occurrence of the chytrid fungus, which has already eradicated many amphibian species globally, is a grim example of how urgent it is to acquire further information.
Asian Common Toad. Photo by Herpetology Lab, Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi
Researchers just published the first comprehensive study on all known amphibian species of Pakistan in the open-access journalZooKeys. In it, they report 21 species from the country, providing their identification key and photographic guide. However, as many of Pakistan’s potential amphibian habitats are difficult to access and study, especially the high-altitude northern and arid western mountains, it is highly likely that a lot of species are yet to be discovered.
Burrowing Frog (in amplexus). Photo by Herpetology Lab, Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi
In particular, the authors point out that habitats facing destruction, urbanization, pollution, unsustainable utilization and other human-caused threats need to be put on high priority, so that suitable conservation strategies can be devised. This way, amphibian populations would be better controlled with less financial, administrative, and human resources.
So far, amphibians have been excluded from all current legislative and policy decisions in the country. Likewise, they are not protected under any law. Hence, the legislation pertaining to rare and endemic species needs to be updated. Schedule III, which includes protected species, provincial and federal wildlife laws, and CITES appendices are in particular need of revision.
Common Skittering Frog. Photo by Herpetology Lab, Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi
Currently, wildlife conservation projects in Pakistan mainly focus on carnivores, ungulates and birds. Therefore, the authors of the study propose adopting an inclusive wildlife conservation approach in Pakistan. This approach would advocate the integration of poorly documented taxa, such as amphibians, in wildlife conservation and management projects. It is by highlighting the significance of their existence and the intrinsic values of all wildlife species that local ecosystems can remain healthy in the long run.
“There is also a dire need to change social attitudes towards the appreciation and significance of amphibians in our society. This could be achieved by initiating community awareness, outreach and school classrooms, and through citizen science programs,” add the researchers.
Research article: Rais M, Ahmed W, Sajjad A, Akram A, Saeed M, Hamid HN, Abid A (2021) Amphibian fauna of Pakistan with notes on future prospects of research and conservation. ZooKeys 1062: 157-175.https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1062.66913
While the onion, garlic, scallion, shallot and chives have been on our plates for centuries, becoming staple foods around the world, their group, the genus Allium, seems to be a long way from running out of surprises. Recently, a group of researchers from India described a new onion species from the western Himalaya region, long known to the locals as “jambu” and “phran”, in the open-access journal PhytoKeys.
The genus Allium contains about 1,100 species worldwide, including many staple foods like onion, garlic, scallion, shallot and chives. Even though this group of vegetables has been making appearances at family dinners for centuries, it turns out that it is a long way from running out of surprises, as a group of researchers from India recently found out.
The flower of Allium negianum
In 2019, Dr. Anjula Pandey, Principal Scientist at ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources in New Delhi, together with scientists, Drs K Madhav Rai, Pavan Kumar Malav and S Rajkumar, was working on the systematic botany of the genus Allium for the Indian region, when the team came across plants of what would soon be confirmed as a new species for science in the open-access journal PhytoKeys.
The plant, called Allium negianum, was discovered in the Indo-Tibetan border area of Malari village, Niti valley of Chamoli district in Uttarakhand. It grows at 3000 to 4800 m above sea level and can be found along open grassy meadows, sandy soils along rivers, and streams forming in snow pasture lands along alpine meadows (locally known as “bugyal” or “bugial”), where the melting snow actually helps carry its seeds to more favourable areas. With a pretty narrow distribution, this newly described speciesis restricted to the region of western Himalaya and hasn’t yet been reported from anywhere else in the world. The scientific name Allium negianum honours the late Dr. Kuldeep Singh Negi, an eminent explorer and Allium collector from India.
Although new to science, this species has long been known under domestic cultivation to local communities. While working on this group, the research team heard of phran, jambu, sakua, sungdung, and kacho – different local names for seasoning onions. According to locals, the one from Niti valley was particularly good, even deemed the best on the market.
The bulb and underground parts of Allium negianum.
So far only known from the western Himalaya region, Allium negianum might be under pressure from people looking to taste it: the researchers fear that indiscriminate harvest of its leaves and bulbs for seasoning may pose a threat to its wild populations.
Plants of Allium negianum under cultivation
Wild habitat of Allium negianum in Niti region in Himalaya, India
Research article:
Pandey A, Rai KM, Malav PK, Rajkumar S (2021) Allium negianum (Amaryllidaceae): a new species under subg. Rhizirideum from Uttarakhand Himalaya, India. PhytoKeys 183: 77-93.https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.183.65433
The recent Desert Locust upsurge had a major impact on Pakistan’s agriculture, with swarms causing immense damage to all types of crops. A joint French-Pakistani team provides an overview of the dynamics of this upsurge, assesses its impact and control measures, and clarifies the role of different stakeholders in the management of this pest, suggesting various improvements for the future. The study was published in the open access Journal of Orthoptera Research.
In 2019 and 2020, desert locusts once again plagued parts of East Africa and huge areas as far as India and Pakistan through the Arabian Peninsula, in an infestation that was described as the worst in decades. A serious agricultural pest, the desert locust Schistocerca gregaria can feed on most types of crops, including grains, vegetables and fruit, causing significant damage to agricultural production and threatening food security in many countries.
Since the 1960s, a preventive control strategy against this pest has been implemented, based on monitoring of outbreak areas and ecological conditions, followed, if necessary, by early intervention and limited use of pesticides, so that any outbreak can be stopped as soon as possible. With 60 years of hindsight, desert locust invasions are now less frequent, smaller in scale and, if they cannot be stopped early, they are adequately managed.
Desert Locust: mature adult. Photo by A. Monard, CIRAD
However, financial and political uncertainties in many parts of the desert locust’s range continue to sustain the threat, and not all invasions can be stopped early. This was the case in 2018, when such an upsurge was largely aided by rains in the southern Arabian Peninsula. Locusts could not be detected for several months and therefore went unchecked, mainly due to the insecure conditions, especially in Yemen. The swarms then progressively contaminated a large part of East Africa and spread to Iran, Pakistan and India. Pakistan, in particular, subject to periodic swarm invasions in the past, faced a particularly severe situation in 2019-2020, where the swarms could only be contained after several months of intensive control.
Scientists Riffat Sultana, Ahmed Ali Samejo and Samiallah Soomro (University of Sindh, Pakistan), Santosh Kumar (University of Cholistan, Pakistan) and Michel Lecoq (former director of a locust research unit at CIRAD, France) synthesised these two years of upsurge in a new research article published in the open-access Journal of Orthoptera Research. They focused on Pakistan, the damage caused in this country, and the surveillance and control operations undertaken, clarifying, at the same time, at both national and international level, the role of the different actors in the management of this pest, and suggesting some improvements for the future.
Desert Locust: hopper. Photo by A. Foucart, CIRAD
During this upsurge, a great deal of damage was caused to all types of crops. The Government of Pakistan’s preliminary estimate of monetary losses due to desert locusts for the agricultural seasons 2020 and 2021 ranges from $3.4 billion to $10.21 billion. More than 3 million people were facing severe acute food insecurity.
The authors also note that Pakistan needs to continue to be prepared and improve the prevention system already in place. They suggest developing compensatory measures for local populations in the event of an uncontrolled invasion at an early stage, increasing the use of alternatives to chemical pesticides such as mycopesticides, and maintaining funding mechanisms that provide sustainable support even in times of recession. Perhaps the most important challenge is certainly to maintain long-term efforts to build resilience, despite the apparent absence of imminent threats.
Research article:
Sultana R, Kumar S, Samejo AA, Soomro S, Lecoq M (2021) The 2019–2020 upsurge of the desert locust and its impact in Pakistan. Journal of Orthoptera Research 30(2): 145-154. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.30.65971
Events of jaguars predating on and attacking dogs are poorly documented throughout the Americas. Researchers from Mexico and Germany report in detail jaguar attacks on 20 dogs at a tourist site in the Mexican Caribbean. In addition, they describe an initiative proposed by locals as well as national and international NGOs to prevent human-jaguar conflicts due to pet predation. The study was published in the open-access journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.
Mahahual is a small fishing village in the Mexican Caribbean that receives a large number of tourists every year. Over the past 15 years, its population has increased rapidly, and, as a result, people have started to settle in areas away from the main center of the village, sometimes encroaching on jaguar habitats. As most of those people keep guard dogs on their properties, jaguars have taken advantage of this situation by wandering near people’s houses at night, and sometimes those dogs end up as a night-time snack for the big cats.
A jaguar is photographed wandering around houses looking for dogs. Photo by Víctor Rosales
Unlike jaguar attacks on livestock, attacks and predation on other domestic species such as dogs have only been documented anecdotally (through interviews or from remains found in faeces). Such attacks can indeed lead to pet predation conflict, which can ultimately have a negative impact on the jaguar populations. Attachment to pets may lead humans to start killing the big cats, which is of particular concern for an endangered species like the jaguar. Furthermore, it is possible that a wide range of pathogens may be transmitted from dogs to jaguars, further threatening the health of jaguar populations in Mahahual.
A dog injured as a result of a jaguar attack in Mahahual, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Photo by Víctor Rosales
According to their report, the behaviour of Mahahual’s jaguars resembles that of Indian leopards, which have already turned dogs into an important component of their diet, preferring them over livestock. Jaguars and leopards usually attack from a blindside, biting the dogs on the neck or head to avoid counterattacks. Similarly to leopards, jaguars attack at night and kill more dogs during the dry season. This is likely due to the fact that it’s easier for jaguars to hunt dogs than their natural prey: armadillo, lowland paca, brocket deer, white-tailed deer. Furthermore, the latter are less available during the dry season.
One of the night houses built by the people of Mahahual, Aak Mahahual A.C. and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Photo by Francisco Rubén Castañeda
In 2017, the people of Mahahual partnered with Aak Mahahual A.C. and IFAW to build protective night houses made of wood and wire mesh meant to keep dogs safe at night. So far, they’ve built 38 such houses to prevent jaguar attacks. Sterilisation and vaccination campaigns have also been intensified since late 2020 to prevent the transmission of diseases between the two species.
Thanks to this study, we now have a better understanding of the adaptability and persistence of jaguars in human-dominated landscapes and the impact of dog predation by jaguars. However, the authors call for more research in the area to help paint the full picture.
Research article: Carral-García M, Buenrostro I, Weissenberger H, Rosales V, Pérez-Flores J (2021) Dog predation by jaguars in a tourist town on the Mexican Caribbean. Neotropical Biology and Conservation 16(4): 461-474. https://doi.org/10.3897/neotropical.16.e68973
Two new species of venomous snakes were just added to Asia’s fauna – the Nujiang pit viper from Tibet, and the Glacier pit viper found west of the Nujiang River and Heishui, Sichuan.
Two new species of venomous snakes were just added to Asia’s fauna – the Nujiang pit viper (Gloydius lipipengi) from Zayu, Tibet, and the Glacier pit viper (G. swild) found west of the Nujiang River and Heishui, Sichuan, east of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Our team of researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Bangor Universitypublished the discovery in the open-access journal ZooKeys. In this study, we performed a new molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Asian pit vipers.
Glacier pit viper (Gloydius swild)
The Nujiang pit viper has a greyish brown back with irregular black ring-shaped crossbands, wide, greyish-brown stripes behind the eyes, and relativity short fangs, while the Glacier pit viper is blueish-grey, with zigzag stripes on its back, and has relatively narrow stripes behind its eyes.
Nujiang pit viper (Gloydius lipipengi)
Interestingly, the Glacier pit viper was found under the Dagu Holy-glacier National Park: the glacier lake lies 2000 meters higher than the habitat of the snakes, at more than 4,880 m above sea level. This discovery suggests that the glaciers might be a key factor to the isolation and speciation of alpine pit vipers in southwest China.
The glacier lake on top of the mountain near the type locality of Glacier pit viper.
The stories behind the snakes’ scientific names are interesting too: with the new species from Tibet, Gloydius lipipengi, the name is dedicated to my Master’s supervisor, Professor Pi-Peng Li from the Institute of Herpetology at Shenyang Normal University, just in time for Li’s sixtieth birthday. Prof. Li has devoted himself to the study of the herpetological diversity of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and it was under his guidance that I became an Asian pit viper enthusiast and professional herpetological researcher.
Gloydius swild, the new species from Heishui, Sichuan, is in turn named after the SWILD Group, which studies the fauna and biodiversity of southewst China. They discovered and collected the snake during an expedition to the Dagu Holy-glacier.
A misty morning near the habitat of Glacier pit viper.
We are equally impressed by the sceneries we encountered during our field work: throughout our journey, we got to look at sacred, crystal-like glacier lakes embraced by the mountains, morning mist falling over the village, and colorful broadleaf-conifer forests. During our expedition, we met a lot of hospitable Tibetan inhabitants and enjoyed their kindness and treats, which made the expedition all the more unforgettable.
Research article:
Shi J-S, Liu J-C, Giri R, Owens JB, Santra V, Kuttalam S, Selvan M, Guo K-J, Malhotra A (2021) Molecular phylogenetic analysis of the genus Gloydius (Squamata, Viperidae, Crotalinae), with description of two new alpine species from Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China. ZooKeys 1061: 87-108. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1061.70420
“Trends in Arthropods of Alpine Aquatic Ecosystems” is the first topical collection for the journal of the Swiss Entomological Society
The open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal Alpine Entomology, published by Pensoft on behalf of the Swiss Entomological Society, announced its very first topical collection of articles, which will be focusing on arthropods associated with aquatic ecosystems in mountainous regions.
The journal is currently inviting scientists, working on aquatic fauna from alpine habitats, to openly publish their research articles and short notices that provide evidence how arthropods’ biogeography, species communities, distribution, behaviour and morphology have changed in recent times.
“Aquatic invertebrates are key indicators of global or local changes. Furthermore, many aquatic ecosystems are closely linked to mountains because they originate in them. Many valuable unpublished datasets on aquatic arthropod fauna may therefore be available from mountainous regions,”
The aim of the “Trends in Arthropods of Alpine Aquatic Ecosystems” collection is to bring together data and findings about what many agree is the most impacted type of environment on Earth: aquatic ecosystems, especially running waters.
The collection will remain open for submissions for the next two years. In the meantime, the accepted manuscripts will be published on a rolling basis, as soon as they are ready for publication.
Within Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL), 14 key research and natural history institutions commit to link infrastructures and technologies to provide flawless access to biodiversity data.
In a recently started Horizon 2020-funded project, 14 European institutions from 10 countries, representing both the continent’s and global key players in biodiversity research and natural history, deploy and improve their own and partnering infrastructures to bridge gaps between each other’s biodiversity data types and classes. By linking their technologies, they are set to provide flawless access to data across all stages of the research cycle.
Three years in, BiCIKL (abbreviation for Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library) will have created the first-of-its-kind Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, where a researcher will be able to retrieve a full set of linked and open biodiversity data, thereby accessing the complete story behind an organism of interest: its name, genetics, occurrences, natural history, as well as authors and publications mentioning any of those.
Ultimately, the project’s products will solidify Open Science and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data practices by empowering and streamlining biodiversity research.
Together, the project partners will redesign the way biodiversity data is found, linked, integrated and re-used across the research cycle. By the end of the project, BiCIKL will provide the community with a more transparent, trustworthy and efficient highly automated research ecosystem, allowing for scientists to access, explore and put into further use a wide range of data with only a few clicks.
“In recent years, we’ve made huge progress on how biodiversity data is located, accessed, shared, extracted and preserved, thanks to a vast array of digital platforms, tools and projects looking after the different types of data, such as natural history specimens, species descriptions, images, occurrence records and genomics data, to name a few. However, we’re still missing an interconnected and user-friendly environment to pull all those pieces of knowledge together. Within BiCIKL, we all agree that it’s only after we puzzle out how to best bridge our existing infrastructures and the information they are continuously sourcing that future researchers will be able to realise their full potential,”
explains BiCIKL’s project coordinator Prof. Lyubomir Penev, CEO and founder of Pensoft, a scholarly publisher and technology provider company.
Continuously fed with data sourced by the partnering institutions and their infrastructures, BiCIKL’s key final output: the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub, is set to persist with time long after the project has concluded. On the contrary, by accelerating biodiversity research that builds on – rather than duplicates – existing knowledge, it will in fact be providing access to exponentially growing contextualised biodiversity data.
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Learn more about BiCIKL on the project’s website at: bicikl-project.eu
The deep ocean is the last frontier on our planet. It is home to creatures beyond our imagination and filled to the brim with life. Coastal communities have known the value of a healthy ocean for centuries, yet much of its life remains unknown, sitting beyond the reach of most research programs due to the hostility of its depth and vastness. With current research and monitoring activities in the region mostly focussing on shallow reefs, our Field Identification Guide, published in the peer-reviewed, open-access Biodiversity Data Journal, aims to showcase the benthic organisms that inhabit the Seychelles’ deeper reefscapes. The research cruise that gathered the imagery data used to create the guide, Nekton’s “First Descent: Seychelles Expedition”, was the first of its kind to systematically survey deeper reefs in Seychelles waters, bringing to light previously little-known ecosystems and their inhabitants.
The deep ocean is the last frontier on our planet. It is home to creatures beyond our imagination and filled to the brim with life. Coastal communities have known the value of a healthy ocean for centuries, yet much of its life remains unknown, sitting beyond the reach of most research programs due to the hostility of its depth and vastness.
More recently, the importance of deeper ecosystems started moving into the focus of modern marine research as many scientists across the globe are now working to unriddle the mysteries and processes that drive the patterns of life down in the deep.
Deeper reef habitats, starting at ~30m depth beyond SCUBA diving limits, are of crucial importance for coastal communities and adjacent ecosystems alike. They have been found to not only support coral and fish larval supply, aiding shallower reefs, but also to act as a refuge for many species in times of disturbance. Yet, going back to the start of this post – you cannot protect what you don’t know – and we currently know very little about these deeper reefs, especially ones in the Western Indian Ocean region.
We are many nations, but together we are one ocean.
With current research and monitoring activities in the region mostly focussing on shallow reefs, our Field Identification Guide, published in the peer-reviewed, open-access Biodiversity Data Journal, aims to showcase the benthic organisms that inhabit the Seychelles’ deeper reefscapes. The research cruise that gathered the imagery data used to create the guide, Nekton’s “First Descent: Seychelles Expedition”, was the first of its kind to systematically survey deeper reefs in Seychelles waters, bringing to light previously little-known ecosystems and their inhabitants.
All species play relevant roles in trophic relations, in the functioning of ecosystems, and all have a potential biotechnological interest.
Our Field Identification Guide is one of the first efforts to describe the mesophotic and sub-mesophotic reefs in the Western Indian Ocean. To effectively protect these ecosystems, stakeholders need to be able to visualise them and scientists need to be able to identify and classify the organisms they observe. Displaying the diversity of the benthic organisms we encountered is only the first step in a complex and long process, allowing us to categorize, study, monitor and thus effectively protect these habitats.
The correct identification of life is a fundamental building block of ecological knowledge. This international collaboration provided an important place to start from when considering the life on deeper reefs in Seychelles and the wider Western Indian Ocean region.
To survey the benthic flora and fauna of the Seychelles, we used a variety of methods, including submersibles, remotely operated vehicles and SCUBA diving teams equipped with stereo-video camera systems. We then recorded benthic communities during transect surveys conducted at 10 m, 30 m, 60 m, 120 m, 250 m and 350 m depths. This way, we ended up with 45 h of video footage and enough images to be able to present a photographic guide for the visual identification of the marine macrophytes, corals, sponges and other common invertebrates that inhabit Seychelles’ reefs.
We encountered coral fan gardens on steep slopes, boulders entirely encrusted with sponges of all colours and textures, corals of all shapes and sizes, and an amazing variety of critters. The images in our guide cannot do justice to the beauty of these habitats, and more than one tear was shed encountering these intact ecosystems teeming with life. Especially in times of increasingly frequent disturbance events and quickly shifting baselines (i.e., what we would see as a pristine, healthy reef in the 21st century), intact reef systems become increasingly rare. So much so that they are often confined to extremely remote and/or long and heavily protected areas. Finding these deeper reefs intact and with little to no signs of anthropogenic disturbance means hope – hope that there are yet undiscovered and unexplored reefs in the Western Indian Ocean region that show similar traits; and hope that we will discover even more novel habitats worth protecting.
We hope that this guide will help the public to discover the beauty of Seychelles’ deeper reefs and aid current and future monitoring and research activities in Seychelles and the Western Indian Ocean region.
Currently, there are few formalised training materials available to new marine researchers working in mesophotic and deeper reef habitats, especially for the Indian Ocean. The present benthic field ID guide will hopefully be of use to marine researchers, managers, divers and naturalists with the identification of organisms as seen in marine imagery or live in the field.
Paris Stefanoudis – University of Oxford, and Nekton
Taxonomic paper:
Fassbender N, Stefanoudis PV, Filander ZN, Gendron G, Mah CL, Mattio L, Mortimer JA, Moura CJ, Samaai T, Samimi-Namin K, Wagner D, Walton R, Woodall LC (2021) Reef benthos of Seychelles – A field guide. Biodiversity Data Journal 9: e65970. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.9.e65970
The scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft and its self-developed publishing platform ARPHA welcome Biosystematics and Ecology – a journal by the Austrian Academy of Sciences – to its growing open-access scholarly portfolio. By moving to ARPHA, Biosystematics and Ecology now enjoys a long list of high-tech perks, which dramatically enhance the entire publishing process, from submission to publication, distribution and archiving.
The Austrian Academy of Sciences’ journalBiosystematics and Ecology now boasts an improved publishing infrastructure after moving to the technologically advanced ARPHA Platform and signing with publisher and technology provider Pensoft. The publisher, well-established in the domain of biodiversity-themed journals, is eager to welcome this latest addition to its growing open-access portfolio.
Biosystematics and Ecology is a continuation and replaces the established print-onlyBiosystematics and Ecology Series of theAustrian Academy of Sciences’s Commission for Interdisciplinary Ecological Studies. It publishes research focused on biodiversity in Central Europe and around the world, a domain of rapidly growing importance as а global biodiversity crisis is looming. A great advantage of Biosystematics and Ecology, in contrast to its predecessor, is the ability to simply update existing checklists and therefore to account for new scientific findings about taxonomic groups or regions.
The peer-reviewed outlet includes contributions on a wide range of ecology and biosystematics topics, aiming to provide biodiversity data, such as catalogi, checklists and interdisciplinary research to the scientific community, while offering the maximum in accessibility, usability, and transparency. The journal is currently indexed in Crossref and archived in CLOCKSS, Portico and Zenodo.
Having already acquired its own glossy and user-friendly website provided by ARPHA, the journal also takes advantage of the platform’s signature fast-track publishing system, which offers an end-to-end publishing solution from submission to publication, distribution and archiving. The platform offers a synergic online space for authoring, reviewing, editing, production and archiving, ensuring a seamlessly integrated workflow at every step of the publishing process.
Thanks to the financial support of the Academy, Biosystematics and Ecology will publish under Diamond Open Access, which means that it is free to read and publish. Opting for ARPHA’s white-label publishing solution, the journal is published under the Academy’s branding and imprint, while benefiting from all signature high-tech features by ARPHA.
Biosystematics and Ecology also makes use of ARPHA Preprints, another platform developed by Pensoft, where authors can post a preprint in a matter of seconds upon submitting a manuscript to the journal. Once the associated manuscript gets published, the preprint is conveniently linked to the formal paper, displaying its citation details.
ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform offers high-end functionalities such as diverse paper formats (PDF, machine-readable JATS XML, and semantically enriched HTML), automated data export to aggregators, web-service integrations with major global indexing databases, advanced semantics publishing, and automated email notifications and reminders. Features like these make it easy for both humans and machines all over the world to discover, access, cite, and reuse published research.
