Happy birthday Hydrobiologia! 70 years young and still growing…
the focus of the journal is
still similar
Happy birthday Hydrobiologia! 70 years young and still growing…
Diego Fontaneto Koen Martens 0 1 2 3 4
. Sidinei Magela Thomaz 0 1 2 3 4
. Luigi Naselli-Flores 0 1 2 3 4
0 L. Naselli-Flores Department of Biological, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies - Section of Botany and Plant Ecology, University of Palermo , Via Archirafi, 28, 90123 Palermo , Italy
1 S. M. Thomaz Universidade Estadual de Maringa ́, DBI/PEA/Nupe ́lia , Av. Colombo 5790, Maringa ́, PR 87020-900 , Brazil
2 D. Fontaneto (&) National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Ecosystem Study , Largo Tonolli 50, 28922 Verbania Pallanza , Italy
3 K. Martens Department of Biology, University of Ghent, K.L. Ledeganckstraat 355 , 9000 Gent , Belgium
4 K. Martens OD Nature, Freshwater Biology, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences , Vautierstraat 29, 1000 Brussels , Belgium
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Hydrobiologia continues to publish studies from all
corners of the world, and its cosmopolitan approach is
visible also in the composition of the Editorial Board,
which is composed of editors from almost all
continents.
If we focus on the 10 most cited papers (searched
through Google Scholar in November 2017;
Supplementary Table S1) for each 5-year interval from 1948
to 2017, a clear trend is visible in the average number
of authors per paper: from the original average of 1.1
authors per paper, the number almost constantly
increased to 5.3 during the last 5-year period (Fig. 1;
Mann–Kendall trend test: z = 3.9, P \ 0.0001). Thus,
even if language is now limited to English, the number
of collaborative works increased, without limiting the
geographic coverage of the studies.
Overall, diversity and heterogeneity in all their
aspects are still at the core of what Hydrobiologia
strives to publish. Hydrobiologia is devoted to
publishing papers that clearly address questions and
hypotheses on biological diversity in aquatic habitats.
Biodiversity can be loosely defined as biological
diversity at the genetic, species, and community
levels. As such, it has a rather vague definition, but
the term became popular among lay men and in
scientific literature since the end of the last century,
and it is generally accepted that the first use of the term
appeared in the title of a 1988 book, edited by E.
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O. Wilson as the proceedings of a discussion forum on
biological diversity held in Washington D.C. in 1986
(Wilson, 1988)
.
Knowledge on and understanding of the
measurements, distribution, and determinants of biological
diversity are pivotal to analyse current scientific issues
such as ecosystem services, nature-based solutions
and other societal challenges related to the
environment. The study of biodiversity is potentially as old as
human history: people always had to identify living
organisms around them, to be able to use them and to
prevent any harm from them. Even the oldest known
prehistoric paintings in the Chauvet Cave (Arde`che,
France) demonstrate a highly detailed and accurate
knowledge on species diversity
(Chauvet et al., 1996)
.
Edward Wilson even coined a term to define the innate
tendency humans have to be connected with nature:
‘‘biophilia’’
(Wilson, 1986)
. Notwithstanding such a
long history in the study of biodiversity, a lot of work
still needs to be done to describe the patterns and to
understand the processes that lead to the origin and the
maintenance of biodiversity. For example, we are still
far away from having named all extant species, and
potential estimates differ in orders of magnitude: up to
1012 species just among microbes
(Locey & Lennon,
2016)
, although we thus far only described and
classified less than 2 million species. Even for the
species that we assume to be well-known, we cannot
completely assess their population dynamics and their
distributional ranges. Moreover, we can only grasp the
effects of their interactions in the communities and of
how small perturbations at the individual, population,
or species level could affect entire ecosystems
(Hortal
et al., 2015)
.
If we look at the same 10 most cited papers for each
quinquennium we mentioned earlier (Supplementary
Table S1) and we identify the ones that clearly focus
on biodiversity, no significant trend appears in their
abundance across the history of Hydrobiologia
(Fig. 2; Mann–Kendall trend test: z = 0.9, P =
0.369), even if the highest proportion, from 0.6 to
0.7, is in the last decade. The two most recent
celebratory volumes, number 750 and 800, dedicated
to ‘Emerging trends in aquatic ecology’
(Martens,
2015; Naselli-Flores et al., 2017)
, had a comparable
proportion of papers mainly addressing biodiversity
issues, respectively 10/14 (* 0.7) and 8/14 (* 0.6),
well within the range of the last decade. Thus,
Hydrobiologia published studies dealing with
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