We welcome your submission with a broad sense of ‘population ecology’

Researches on Population Ecology is the former name of Population Ecology and the first volume was published in December 1952. All the papers in the first three volumes were written in Japanese with English summary; then the journal made a fresh start from Volume 4 in 1962 with all the papers written in English. Therefore Population Ecology has a long history as an international journal of ecology and we can read the whole contents on the web site of Springer.

Our journal changed its name from Researches on Population Ecology to Population Ecology in 2000. I heard that the first motivation for it was the unnatural usage of English word, but there were many complications to obtain the approval for it from within the society because the renaming the journal was an influential affair on the journal itself. At that time both the merits and the demerits were also discussed. Although the simple name Population Ecology can strongly appeal to the readership, ‘population ecology’ is also the name of an established area in ecology and then it may lead to a misunderstanding that the journal only covers the studies on population dynamics for abundance or distribution. As Shimada (2000) wrote in his editorial, Population Ecology experienced the renaissance at that time and then the aims and scope of the journal were also revised and clarified as “Population Ecology publishes original research articles and reviews (including invited reviews) on various aspects of ‘population ecology’, from the individual to the community level, without page limit. Among the specific fields included are population dynamics and distribution, evolutionary ecology, ecological genetics, theoretical models, conservation biology, agroecosystem studies, and bioresource management” (cited from the web site of Population Ecology). Comparing it to the published articles in the present Population Ecology, a broader range of the fields are definitely covered but several areas mentioned in the aims and scope are still less represented.

I believe that ‘population ecology’ has been one of the most attractive study areas in ecology, which can be proved by looking at the contents in Population Ecology. Namely ‘population ecology’ in a broad spectrum of the research fields is still a developing study area, which is affected by and also affects on other areas of ecological studies. Then we are waiting for your submission fitted to the aims and scope of Population Ecology, in which a broad sense of ‘population ecology’ is included. Your submission may contribute to lead us to a new direction of ‘population ecology’.

Special feature

Based on the symposium at University of Tsukuba in October 2014, Yukihiko Toquenaga organized the special feature “Bayesian, Fisherian, error, and evidential statistical approaches for population ecology” with four articles. Most of the articles in Population Ecology use the statistical approaches for the collected data. Unfortunately, however, except the experts of statistics, we are always puzzled to find an appropriate method to deal with them because various different statistical approaches exist. This special feature tries to compromise typical different statistical approaches: classical statistics, Bayesian statistics and evidential statistics.

Editorial statistics

During the year 2014, a total of 152 manuscripts were submitted from authors located in 37 different countries. Fifty-three (34.9 %) manuscripts originated from Europe, Japan provided 25 (16.4 %), North America and Asia (other than Japan) tied with 24 (15.8 %). The rate of acceptance was 29.0 % for non-invited papers. The acceptance rate of manuscripts from Japan was much higher than the average, and those from North America and Europe were also higher than the average. The number of manuscripts from Oceania is small but the acceptance rate is very high.

The average time (±SD) between the receipt of a manuscript and the return of the first report to the authors was lengthened to 51.2 days (±37.4) from 45.2 days (±35.6) in 2013 and 42.5 days (±31.7) in 2012. The first round of reviews was completed within 60 days for 94 manuscripts (61.8 %), while the number of manuscripts for which the first round of reviews was finished within 90 days was 126 (82.9 %). Forty-six manuscripts (30.3 %) were rejected by the editors before being sent to reviewers.

We appreciate your cooperation to review the submitted articles to Population Ecology, and would like you to continue to help us.

Photos on the cover page

All the four photos were selected from articles published in 2015 (Volume 57).

The photo on upper left shows the hummingbird (Sephanoides fernandensis) feeding on Cabbage Tree (Dendroseris litoralis), both being critically endangered endemics of Robinson Crusoe Island. The 2010 Chilean tsunami destroyed more than half of all Cabbage Trees, and led to a hummingbird population decrease to about 740 individuals in 2011. Hahn et al.’s (2015) study represents the first documentation of a severe tsunami impact on the population of a small terrestrial bird through loss of an important food source.

Glenn Dubois, a co-author of Le Gouar et al. (2015), did his Ph.D. on ecology of the hermit beetle (Osmoderma eremita), an elusive and endangered saproxylic insect (upper right). Using five years of intensive mark–recapture–release and radio-tracking surveys in two regions of France, he estimated population size at the adult stage survival and dispersal rate for each sex separately.

Li and Ramula (2015) examined the demographic strategies of invasive plant populations (including the perennial herb Lupinus polyphyllus, lower left) to cope with temporal environmental variation. They found that the populations of woody invaders tend to be more buffered against temporal variation than those of herbaceous invaders.

In Hwange National Park, plains zebras (lower right) were monitored by capture–mark–recapture for eight years. Survival rates were estimated from 248 individual life histories. In this ecosystem, predation was likely to be the main ecological process causing low survival, and therefore a decline in the zebra population (Grange et al. 2015).