Aquatic Organisms for Environmental Monitoring

Dear Colleagues,

This is a call for papers relating to the use of biological effects to monitor the status of marine, brackish and freshwater ecosystems. There already exists a large literature on how different external stressors affect aquatic organisms and the main focus of this Special Issue is on the organisms themselves and the properties they have that make them particularly relevant in a monitoring context. For the purposes of this Special Issue, “organism” also includes populations and combination or aggregations of species, i.e., communities.

One major challenges in understanding how and whether anthropogenic activities impact on aquatic organisms is to separate natural variation from the consequences of such activities. Natural processes may also modulate the effect of environmental changes caused by humans. It is therefore particularly important to identify and describe biological systems in which it is possible to clearly separate the two and, even better, able to quantitatively describe the interaction. Similarly, it is important to be able to quantify the relative contribution of different stressors, e.g., eutrophication and contaminants, acidification and eutrophication or different contaminants.

It is easier to assess environmental change over time with organisms or assemblages that are more or less sessile, i.e., benthic, and there is a need for approaches that address changes in pelagic habitats. As indicated above, this Special Issue invites papers on taxonomic levels from bacteria to whales and from single species to communities.

Special interests: Mechanisms of toxicity, interactions, effect monitoring, integrated assessment

Prof. Dr. Ketil Hylland
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. Fishes 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.

• biological effect
• environmental
• eutrophication
• contaminant
• acidification
• eutrophication
• aquatic
• interaction
• monitoring
• integrated
• assessment