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Environmental Research: Ecology

About Environmental Research: Ecology

“Ecosystems across the globe are undergoing enormous changes brought about by human transformation and unsustainable exploitation of resources. International agreements recognize these pressures and the need for science and policy to address them, yet management and conservation need to be better informed by advances in ecological research. Environmental Research: Ecology provides a forum for studies documenting change across ecosystems spanning regional, continental and global spatial scales to help inform science-based solutions, through the use of either traditional or novel approaches.”

Scott Goetz, Northern Arizona University, USA

Scope

Environmental Research: Ecology™ is a multidisciplinary, open access journal devoted to addressing important macroscale challenges at the interface of ecology, biodiversity and conservation. The journal bridges scientific progress and methodological advances with assessments of environmental change impacts on ecosystems, and the responses of those ecosystems to change, including resilience, vulnerability and adaptation in the broadest sense. A specific goal of the journal is to provide a forum to promote dialogue between field ecologists, remote sensing experts, modelers, resource managers and policy experts. All research methodologies are encouraged, including qualitative, quantitative, experimental, theoretical and applied approaches to the field.

The journal welcomes, but is not limited to, articles on any of the following subjects:

  • Applied ecology and the management of biological resources (including wildlife and habitat management, sustainable land use, restoration ecology);
  • Biodiversity and species abundance;
  • Conservation (including planning and risk assessment);
  • Macrosystems ecology (across scales)
  • Terrestrial and marine organismal ecology;
  • Remote sensing applied to ecological impacts and responses;
  • Tools and computational methods to study ecological systems (including AI, informatics and Big Data);
  • Ecology and societal implications, including traditional ecological knowledge.

Why should you publish in Environmental Research: Ecology?

  • Broad multidisciplinary scope: a broad scope that brings together all communities working on global challenges relating to the environment, ecology, biodiversity and conservation.
  • Open access: all articles are published under a CC BY licence, enabling immediate and perpetual access, and permitting the widest possible dissemination and reuse of content.
  • High quality standards: with strict editorial criteria aimed at publishing only work that makes a major advance in a specialist field.
  • High quality peer review: adopting the same high level of service as Environmental Research Letters (including Transparent Peer Review), all articles are rigorously peer reviewed by IOP Publishing’s global network of expert reviewers, supported by the journal’s diverse Editorial Board.
  • Fast publication: committed to providing a fast, professional service to ensure rapid first decision and publication. acceptance and publication. Once accepted, articles will be accessible to readers within 24 hours with a citable DOI.
  • Article flexibility: a comprehensive range of article classifications aimed at serving and representing a broad audience extending to academia, industry and government.
  • Pre-print friendly: authors are encouraged to post on community pre-print platforms.
  • Data and code: authors are encouraged to include relevant citable datasets and programmable code in line with IOP Publishing’s data availability policy.
  • Society owned: IOP Publishing is a leading society publisher and profits generated are invested in the Institute of Physics, helping to support science research, education and outreach around the world.

Article types

Environmental Research: Ecology welcomes submissions of the following article types:

  • Papers: Articles of unlimited length that report quality original research with conclusions representing a significant advance in the field.
  • Letters: Outstanding concise articles, reporting important, new and timely developments. These articles should be deserving of priority review, and you are required to upload a justification statement along with your submission. As a guide, Letters should not generally be more than eight journal pages (or around 4500 words) in length.
  • Topical Reviews: Written by leading researchers in their fields, these articles present the background to and overview of a particular field, and the current state of the art. Topical review articles are normally invited by the Editorial Board.
  • Special issue papers: Research papers published as part of a guest-edited collection centred around an emerging and highly topical field.
  • Roadmaps: Broad, multi-author reviews in which leaders in the field discuss the latest developments and future research directions.
  • Perspectives: Commentaries on the impact of previously published work, or authoritative discussions on the future direction of a field that are of notable interest to the community. Perspectives must include an abstract. Article length is flexible but as a general guide length we recommend 3000 words (excluding figures and references).
  • Comments and replies: Comments on, or criticisms of, work previously published in the journal. The authors of the original article will be invited to submit a reply.

Peer review

The following summary describes the peer review process for Environmental Research: Ecology, using the ANSI/NISO Standard Terminology for Peer Review:

  • Identity transparency: single-anonymous, double-anonymous (author choice)
  • Reviewer interacts with: Editor

Our Publishing Support website provides more information on our reviewing process as well as checklists in both English and Chinese language to help authors prepare their manuscripts for submission.

If an article is not accepted for publication, we may offer the author the opportunity to transfer their submission to other suitable journals we publish.

Inclusivity and diversity

IOP Publishing recognises that there are inequalities within the scientific publishing and research ecosystems. We are committed to a progressive approach to inclusivity and diversity, and are working hard to eliminate discrimination to foster an equitable and welcoming publishing environment for all.

IOP Publishing follows Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images in Scholarly Communication to ensure that journal articles use bias-free and culturally sensitive communication. We ask authors to please follow these guidelines in their manuscript submissions.

More information about our work on inclusivity is available on our Open Physics hub.

Ethics

Environmental Research: Ecology maintains the highest standards of publication and research ethics and is a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors are expected to comply with IOP Publishing’s Ethical Policy.

Research data

Environmental Research: Ecology has adopted IOP Publishing’s research data policy. Please check that your article complies with the policy before submission.

Please note that this policy requires authors to include a data availability statement in their article.

For any questions about the policy please contact the journal.

Many research funders now require authors to make all data related to their research available in an online repository. Please refer to the policy for further information about research data, data repositories and data citation.

Open access

Environmental Research: Ecology is a fully open access journal. Articles are published under a CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) licence. Articles are freely available to everyone to read and reuse immediately upon publication, provided attribution to the author is given. Publication is funded by article publication charges (APCs).

For more information on IOP Publishing’s open access policies please see our Open access page.

Publication charges

Environmental Research: Ecology has no subscription charges and the costs of publication are fully funded by article publication charges (APCs).

As part of our commitment to open science, IOP Publishing is covering the article publication charge (APC) for all articles published in the journal. The list prices shown below will not be charged if your article is accepted for publication.

GBP EUR USD
Article publication charge* £1775 €2040 $2395
Reduced article publication charge* for Group B countries** £500 €575 $675
Reduced article publication charge for Group A countries** £0 €0 $0

*excluding VAT where applicable

**eligibility criteria can be found here

APCs only apply to articles accepted for publication; there are no submission charges.

There are no other charges for publishing in Environmental Research: Ecology.

Paying for open access

Various discounts, waivers and funding arrangements are available to support our authors. Visit our Paying for open access page for further details.

Abstracting and indexing services

We work with our authors to help make their work as easy to discover as possible. Articles published in Environmental Research: Ecology will be available in relevant indexing services and databases when appropriate.

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