Functional Diversity in Freshwater Organisms: Historical Patterns and Impact of Anthropogenic Activities

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a new Special Issue on “Functional Diversity in Freshwater Organisms: Historical Patterns and Impact of Anthropogenic Activities” in the journal Diversity.

Although covering as few as 0.01% of the Earth surface, freshwater ecosystems are widely diverse, support an extraordinary diversity of life, and are key ecosystems for human sustainability. Freshwater ecosystems are also the most imperiled ecosystems on Earth due to human activities all across the world. Understanding their functioning would hence help to better protect them and maintain the key ecosystem services humanity depends on.

A key goal of ecology is to better understand the response of communities to disturbance and the implications for ecosystem functioning, to ultimately improve conservation planning. To this end, a functional ecology of communities has been developing for more than three decades for many plant and animal taxa. This approach is based on the use of functional traits, defined as any biological attribute measurable on an individual that influences organism performance and, thus, fitness. Functional trait-based approaches allow researchers to understand patterns structuring communities to identify what processes are responsible for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

While global patterns of functional diversity have been revealed in recent years for several taxonomic groups and in particular freshwater fishes, regional and local scales patterns of functional diversity are still sparse in freshwater ecosystems. In particular, the role of environmental drivers is to structure the functional diversity of the communities and how it varies across the world. This Special Issue is hence an exciting opportunity to combine studies to better understand the role of environmental variables and changes in species composition on the functional structure of the freshwater community at different spatial scales. Thus, we invite submissions that address those aspects of functional structure of communities in freshwater organisms and evaluate responses to human disturbances from local to regional scales.

Dr. Aurèle Toussaint
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short 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 thoroughly refereed through a single-blind 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.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• functional diversity
• freshwater
• human activities
• non-native species
• threatened species