Unifying Ecology across Scales: Progress, Challenges and Opportunities

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Ecology is a branch of biology that studies the interactions among organisms and their biophysical environment, which includes both biotic and abiotic components. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species.

Ecology itself includes:

  • Life processes, interactions, and adaptations
  • The movement of materials and energy through living communities
  • The successional development of ecosystems
  • The abundance and distribution of organisms and biodiversity in the context of the environment

The Journal “International Journal of Pure and Applied Zoology” builds on recent efforts to unify understanding of disparate ecological systems and clades across scales into a single framework. The idea is to identify progress, challenges and opportunities associated with current approaches based on flows of energy and materials across scales from organisms to ecosystem. Particularly, the journal would like to encourage papers that address current gaps in existing theories, and to advance approaches for filling these gaps to lead to a more efficient ecological unification.

As per our Editorial board members, this Research Topic will bring together research papers that use different approaches in diverse ecological systems to broaden our perspective on how to unify ecology across scales. Approaches should involve theory development and/or laboratory-based empirical science. Potential synergies between metabolic scaling theory, ecological stoichiometry, concepts of information, population dynamics and life-history theory should lead to new insights and better understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes and outcomes.

This Research topic is therefore targeted for every scientist interested in a coherent, multi-scale ecological science. We strongly believe that a unified ecological science can help address major challenges like identifying limits to consequences of global change, designing exploitation and conservation systems that respect the flows of information, matter and energy as components of resilience, and integrating these flows into a cohesive predictive framework for the evolution of organisms under a changing world.

We believe this theme is timely. Humans dominate the planet's ecology, and yet scientists struggle to understand the laws governing living systems that span such broad scales of space, time and biological organization. It is our hope that this Research Topic will span the fields of ecology, evolution, physics, information theory, network science and physiology to further foster the discussion surrounding this topic and accelerate its development.

A standard EDITORIAL TRACKING SYSTEM is utilized for manuscript submission, review, editorial processing and tracking which can be securely accessed by the authors, reviewers and editors for monitoring and tracking the article processing. Manuscripts can be uploaded online at Editorial Tracking System (https://www.scholarscentral.org/submissions/international-pure-applied-zoology.html) or forwarded to the Editorial Office at zoology@peerreviewedjournals.com.

Media Contact:

Liza Smith
Journal Manager
International Journal of Pure and Applied Zoology
Email: zoology@peerreviewedjournals.com