Happy birthday Hydrobiologia! 70 years young and still growing…

Hydrobiologia, Jan 2018

Diego Fontaneto, Sidinei Magela Thomaz, Luigi Naselli-Flores, Koen Martens

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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 - 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. rep 51 a p r e p s r thuo 10 a f o r e b m nu 5 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 0 2 5 9 1 8 4 9 1 7 5 9 1 3 5 9 1 2 6 9 1 8 5 9 1 7 6 9 1 3 6 9 1 to provide an outlet for the publication of hi (...truncated)


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Diego Fontaneto, Sidinei Magela Thomaz, Luigi Naselli-Flores, Koen Martens. Happy birthday Hydrobiologia! 70 years young and still growing…, Hydrobiologia, 2018, pp. 1-3, DOI: 10.1007/s10750-017-3476-9