Disturbance Ecology: A New Emerging Field in Basic/Applied Ecology and Conservation

Dear Colleagues,

The effects of human activities are evident everywhere around our planet. Together with the modifying agents of natural origin (‘disturbances’), our species has heavily shaped the natural ecosystems and landscapes through historical and recent processes (‘threats’) characterized by different spatial and time regimes. Therefore, both academic basic/applied ecologists and conservation practitioners managing species and habitats must necessarily obtain critical information on extent, duration, frequency, intensity, predictability of a large set of natural disturbances and, overall, of human-induced threats pressing on conservation targets (populations, communities, ecosystems, and processes). All these data will be useful to develop strategies following logical problem-solving procedures and decision making approaches.

Nonetheless, although disturbance ecology (as a basic discipline) and threat analysis (as an applied conservation science discipline) are proving to be very ‘hot’ emerging arenas rich in new conceptual tools and operational approaches, they are still relatively little used in conservation project management.

Moreover, due to the transversal aspect of these disciplines (disturbances and threats are chemical, physical, and biological events and could be classified following many criteria), many papers are dispersed in journals belonging to different (and often ‘distant’) disciplinary fields (basic ecology, vegetation science, risk analysis, environmental sciences, pollution, chemistry, conservation, environmental impact assessment, etc.), making it difficult to define a disciplinary arrangement and evaluation of its progress.

Hereby, we want to propose a collection of original peer-reviewed papers written by experts with a specific background on a wide range of topics related to disturbance ecology and threat analysis, in both temperate and tropical regions.

Dr. Corrado Battisti
Prof. Dr. Luca Luiselli
Collection Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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