The biodiversity, or number of different species of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and insects, of our planet is so important. Each ecosystem is a complex network of organisms that interact with their physical environment. Human activity has been highly disruptive to the biodiversity of the planet, with scientists showing evidence that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event due to “accelerated modern human–induced species losses” (Ceballos, 2015). However, this reality does not have to stay so grim. Through research, intervention, and conservation, there are huge efforts underway to prevent species loss and combat global warming. Plus, it seems as if the younger generations, led by activists like Greta Thunberg, are sparking change in government policy and the culture. Additionally, only last year the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) reported some hopeful news that populations of tigers in India and Nepal, African elephants in Namibia, black rhinos, giant pandas, and mountain gorillas are in recovery!
Browse this post for current Biodiversity and Ecological Research
In this post, we’re highlighting research papers from Collections on ScienceOpen that cover biodiversity and ecology. These Collections range from researcher-led collections on very specialized topics to broad publisher collections that contain content from multiple journals. It is our vision that through our Collections infrastructure, important research will be more discoverable and therefore accelerate scientific communication so that fields, such as ecology, can progress faster.
Open science is not only about free PDFs! It is also fundamentally concerned with the ways of collecting, storing and transforming data, as well as making sure that research does not live in a vacuum but has a home among other relevant publications. Rich databases, comprehensive discovery environments and integrated web services are going to play the central role in such reshaping of scholarly communication.
Therefore, in order to facilitate this technological shift, ScienceOpen and Pensoft Publishers have entered into a strategic collaboration partnership that will focus on the unified indexation, the integration of Pensoft’s ARPHA Platform content into ScienceOpen and the utilization of novel streams of scientific dissemination for the published materials.
This partnership bring together two leaders of innovative content dissemination. From promotional collections to Open Access hosting and full publishing packages, ScienceOpen provides next-generation services to academic publishers embedded in an interactive discovery platform. Pensoft Publishers is an independent academic publishing company, well known worldwide for bringing novelty, its cutting-edge publishing tools and commitment to open access practices.
Best wishes for the New Year 2019! Last
month we bid farewell to 2018 by putting our topical researcher-led collections
in focus
and organizing a prize draw for an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet for researchers reviewing any paper on
ScienceOpen in December. Today we would like to thank
everyone who participated in the drawing and are pleased to announce the
winner: Prof. Rolf Georg
Beutel, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena (Jena,
Thüringen).
Prof. Beutel is editor of the collection ‘Coleoptera’,
a comprehensive overview of over 9,000 research articles covering this
immensely diverse group. This ScienceOpen collection goes beyond the
traditional fields of taxonomy and morphology, and integrates an increasing
number of open access records. Curated by an evolutionary biologist who
considers himself primarily a systematist, the collection covers multiple lines
of research, such as phylogeny, classification, genetics, and physiology. ‘Coleoptera’
is an indispensable tool in biodiversity research and provides an essential
reference system for studies in other fields. Evolutionary biology of
Coleoptera relates to topics such as physiological and genetic
backgrounds of feeding habits or reproductive biology, making it an exciting
group to study. This is especially true in our “age of
phylogenomics”, when rapidly growing
molecular data opens new fascinating perspectives in the research on beetles
and other organisms.
