2020/01/01 by Jean‐Michel Gaillard, Nathan J. Sanders, Lesley T. Lancaster +7
Environmental Science · #Wildlife Ecology and Conservation #Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology #Species Distribution and Climate Change
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1365-2656.13165
You will have noticed some new names and faces among our Senior Editor team this year and we are delighted to welcome two new Editors; Lesley Lancaster and Darren Evans. Lesley is no stranger to Journal of Animal Ecology and has been an Associate Editor since 2016. Darren joins us from Animal Conservation and will be familiar with the British Ecological Society (BES) in his role as Vice-Chair of the Policy Committee. Lesley and Darren have introduced themselves on the Journal blog (Animal Ecology in Focus, 2019a) where you can find out more in our ‘Meet the Editor’ series. Lesley is enthusiastic to develop the Journal's impact in evolutionary ecology and macroecology, with a focus on understanding the drivers of animal responses to environmental change, and incorporating global perspectives and new technologies in approaches to global problems affecting animal populations. Darren will focus on growing the Journal's reputation in population and community ecology and evolution, in particular drawing on recent advances in molecular ecology and complexity science. Both new Editors are committed to innovative ways of improving the Journal in a rapidly changing publishing world. Indeed, the Senior Editor team would welcome suggestions, ideas and feedback that authors, reviewers and readers might have. While we are delighted to welcome new Editors to the board, this means we have had to sadly say farewell to others. After 5 years as Senior Editor, Ben Sheldon stepped down earlier this year in July in order to focus on his many other (and growing) commitments. We are very grateful for Ben's contributions to the Journal, which includes acting as a strong advocate of the Journal's open data policy and championing our How to… and Synthesis paper series. In a room full of reasonable people, Ben was always the most reasonable, and his steady and clear thinking helped shape Journal of Animal Ecology, and continues to shape the entire field. Our Executive Editor, Ken Wilson, also left the Journal at the end of 2019. Ken served Journal of Animal Ecology for many years, he first joined the board as an Associate Editor in 2007, became a Senior Editor in 2009 and Executive Editor in 2014. Ken has made many fantastic contributions to the Journal over the past 9 years as Senior Editor but one of his most notable legacies to the Journal has been his effort to drive a significant shift in the gender balance of the editorial board from just 13% women in 2014 to the current 50%. This drive has also resulted in an improvement in the diversity of our Associate Editors who now represent 18 countries. Ken was ahead of his time in this regard, and his steadfast courage in promoting diversity at the journal set a standard that other journals envy, but a standard they should strive to match (or even surpass). The hard work and dedication of Ken and Ben have seen the Journal maintain its position as the premier journal for animal ecology research. The new Editors will strive to build on all this good work by continuing to embrace all aspects of diversity across the Journal's activities. Jean-Michel Gaillard is taking over from Ken as Executive Editor. Jean-Michel intends to build on Ken's legacy by increasing the diversity of the papers we publish both in terms of authors' countries and biological models studied. Likewise, he is looking forward to Journal of Animal Ecology publishing a larger number of theoretical papers and more work at the interface between ecology and evolution. Both Ken and Ben were major drivers in increasing transparency and open processes in the Journal (Wilson et al., 2018a). As part of this work, the journal introduced open calls for Special Features. The aim of running Special Features in this way is to ensure a wide range of viewpoints from individuals who may take a different, or even contrary opinions, are received. The first of these Special Features was on Animal Host-Microbe Interactions (Hoye & Fenton, 2018), a topic proposed by Ken. This Special Feature was a great success with 19 articles published, and we have continued to run Special Features in this way. Our second open call Special Feature on Biologging is published in this issue; see Börger et al. (2020). We are now collaborating with our partner journals at the BES; with Methods in Ecology and Evolution we will be publishing an open call Special Feature on Animal Social Networks (Animal Ecology in Focus, 2019b). Currently, we are running a call for papers for a Special Feature on Citizen Science that spans the six BES journals Functional Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Journal of Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and People and Nature. The deadline for submissions is Monday 27 January 2020 so if you work on citizen science don't delay and get your submission in soon (https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/citizensciencecfp?=)! We continue welcome proposals for Special Features from teams of guest editors and a key criterion we look at when judging proposals is the diversity of the proposed authors. If you have an idea for a Special Feature for Journal of Animal Ecology either as a guest editor or as an open call topic please get in contact with the editorial office ([email protected]). Journal of Animal Ecology has long championed early career researchers and this has continued under Ken's stewardship. In 2016 we launched the Sidnie Manton award (Wilson et al., 2018b), a new award for early career researchers to write a Reviews or Synthesis paper. In 2018 we announced our first winner of the award and in 2020 we will be announcing the second winner of the Sidnie Manton Award, look out for updates on our blog and twitter feed. The Sidnie Manton Award complements the Elton Prize, which is awarded for the best Research Article published in each volume. The 2018 Elton prize, announced earlier this year, was awarded to Hannah White for her paper ‘Contribution of local rarity and climatic suitability to local extinction and colonization varies with species traits’ (White, Montgomery, & Lennon, 2018). In this paper, Hannah and colleagues seek to connect four key themes in animal ecology: abundance, spatial distribution, climate change and species-specific traits; and apply these to data to ask which of these themes and their combinations best explain distributional changes of birds across Britain over decadal time-scales. White et al. (2018) use data collected as part of a huge citizen science effort by ornithologists across the UK, under the auspices of the British Trust for Ornithology atlas projects form the 1960s to 1990s. Their paper sets out a complex statistical modelling exercise with admirable clarity, and also presents the results in clear, informative and easy-to-comprehend tables and graphics. The paper shows that understanding changes in the distribution of birds at this scale (both colonizations and extinctions) requires knowledge of both climatic suitability and measures of local rarity (defined as the extent to which local patches are surrounded by occupied patches). It further shows that these effects are moderated by some species-specific characteristics (all of this analysis performed under a rigorous phylogenetically controlled framework), but that by far the most important character is the range size of a species. The results are important because they both provide an example of the joint effect of climate and local rarity in understanding population processes, but also because they provide such a clear framework to enable analyses extended to other spatial and temporal scales, and to other taxa. As a winner of the Elton Prize, we were pleased to welcome Hannah White as an Associate Editor on the Journal. Joining Hannah as an Associate Editor in 2019, we're also pleased to welcome Jonathan Shik, Elise Zipkin Roberto Salguero-Gómez, Mark Hewison and Francesca Cagnacci. Journal of Animal Ecology Associate Editors are asked to serve a 3-year term as Editors with a maximum of three, 3-year terms. Having fixed terms for Associate Editors allows us to keep the board fresh, but that means we have to say goodbye to some great Associate Editors who have served the Journal for up to 9 years. This year we said goodbye to Martijn van de Pol, John Fryxell, Peter Hamback, Frank Johansson, Julie Morand-Ferron, Sheena Cotter and Sandra Bouwhuis. We are grateful for the work they have done for the Journal. This summer, the British Ecological Society journals will be running an open call for new Associate Editors so if you'd like to join the team lookout for the call on any of the journal and BES websites.