Conservation and ecology journal ranks 2023

6 12 2024

Quite a bit late this year, but I’ve finally put together the 2023 conservation / ecology / sustainability journal ranks based on my (published) journal-ranking method (as I’ve done every year since 2008).

After 16 years of doing this exercise, I can’t help but notice that most journals don’t do much differently from year to year. They mostly tend to publish the same number of papers, get the same number of total publications, and therefore, remain approximately in the same rank relative to others.

Some things to note: Clarivate continues to modify its algorithm, meaning that most journal Impact Factors have gone down yet again. This is somewhat irrelevant from the perspective of relative ranking, but it might piss off a few journals.

I therefore present the new 2023 ranks for: (i) 111 ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals, (ii) 29 open-access (i.e., you have to pay) journals from the previous category, (iii) 68 ‘ecology’ journals, (iv) 33 ‘conservation’ journals, (v) 44 ‘sustainability’ journals (with general and energy-focussed journals included), and (vi) 21 ‘marine & freshwater’ journals.

Here are the results:

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Categories : conservation, scientific publishing

5000 piggies, 500 piggies, 100 piggies, … and there there was none

4 12 2024

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019–2020 that razed more than half of the landscape on Kangaroo Island in South Australia left an indelible mark on the island’s unique native biodiversity, which is still struggling to recover. 

Flinders Chase National Park on Kangaroo Island after the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires (credit: CJA Bradshaw)

However, one big bonus for the environment’s recovery is the likely eradication of feral pigs (Sus scrofa). Invasive feral pigs cause a wide range of environmental, economic and social damages. In Australia, feral pigs occupy about 40% of the mainland and offshore islands, with a total, yet highly uncertain, population size estimated in the millions. 

Feral pigs are recognised as a key threatening process under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, with impacts on at least 148 nationally threatened species and eight threatened ecological communities. They are a declared invasive species and the subject to control programs in all Australian jurisdictions.

Motion sensing cameras deployed during the eradication program capture feral pigs using their snouts to search for soil-borne food. This behaviour, called rooting, creates large areas of disturbed soil, killing native vegetation and spreading invasive weeds and pathogens (credit: PIRSA).

In a new article published in Ecosphere, a collaboration between PIRSA Biosecurity and the Global Ecology Laboratory at Flinders University analysed optimal strategies for culling feral pigs. 

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Categories : agriculture, alien species, Australia, demography, ecology, economics, environmental economics, environmental policy, invasive species, mammal, management, modelling, monitoring, pig, population dynamics, research, South Australia, southern Australia, stochasticity