Special Issue "Long-Term Anthropic Influences on the Diversity of Amazonian Landscapes and Biota"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. William Balée
Department of Anthropology, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA
E-Mail:
Phone: +1 504 862 3055
Fax: +1 504 865 5338
Interests: historical ecology; ethnobiology; amazonia

Dear Colleagues,

Forests and savannas of Amazonia represent intersections of nature and culture. Biological evolution and historical contingency have become intertwined in the explanation of landscapes and their attendant biota in Amazonia. Most models of explanation of species distributions across diverse Amazonian environments tend to be incomplete in one way or another. The refuge model and vicariance biogeography explain diversity by genetic drift, and mostly are different in terms of time scale. Neither considers human factors that could have affected local diversity (alpha diversity) and the diversity across disjunctive landscapes (beta diversity). In contrast to these models, historical ecology, as a research program, offers an understanding of Amazonian landscapes and biota that derives from comprehension of historical contingency and the biological preadaptations of species to human activities on the landscapes affected by those activities. Specific kinds of diversity to be examined with insights from historical ecology include heterogeneity of archaeological landscapes, variation in soil microbes due to agrarian technologies of the past (especially Amazon Dark Earths), patterned distributions of flora (both domesticated and not), and fluctuations in microfauna and other fauna due to human impacts of the past.

Prof. Dr. William Balée
Guest Editor

Submission Information

All manuscripts should be submitted to diversity@mdpi.com with a copy to the Guest Editor. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Diversity is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

For the first two issues, to be published in 2009 and 2010, the Article Processing Charges (APC) will be waived for well-prepared manuscripts. English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

• historical ecology
• contingency factors
• alpha and beta diversity
• landscape heterogeneity
• agrarian technologies