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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Preface: Emerging trends in aquatic ecology II

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You are now consulting the celebratory volume 750 of Hydrobiologia, the international journal of aquatic sciences. The journal has, since its first volume in March 1948, now exactly 67 years ago, covered a lot of ground and has seen a lot of change in the landscape of scientific publishing in general, and in that of aquatic biodiversity in particular. It has evolved from a fairly locally managed journal, to an international journal with ever increasing impact and ranking. With an ISI 2013 Impact Factor of 2.212, it now ranks 32 out of 103 journals in ‘‘Marine and Freshwater Biology’’. But in the ‘‘Marine Sciences and Fisheries’’ Category of Google Scholar, Hydrobiologia ranks proudly at a 9th place with an H5 index of 39 (the highest being Marine Ecology Progress Series with an H5-index of 49). Of course, such metrics never tell the entire story, and if one wants to judge the quality of a journal, other measures of performance must also be taken into account. Of these, the quality of the authorship, of the readership and of the editorial board are paramount. The present volume is very much a joint effort of the editors of Hydrobiologia and their collaborators and we are proud to present you the result. Each paper in this volume has at least one editor of Hydrobiologia as (co-) author, but for some papers, several editors joined forces. For example, the bibliometric paper by Siqueira et al. (2015) has three editors as authors, while the review on aquatic invasive species (Havel et al., 2015) authors a team of five Hydrobiologia editors. The title of the present special issue, ‘‘Emerging Trends in Aquatic Ecology’’, promises a wide canvas of topics, and although we have certainly not covered all ‘‘Emerging Trends’’, we are convinced that the present volume features a fair number of them. In the opening paper, Siqueira et al. (2015) explore the differences in approach to biodiversity analyses (using species richness as a response variable) between aquatic and terrestrial ecologists. They analyse the results of a systematic literature search and conclude that differences between such aquatic and terrestrial studies are not substantial. However, they do stress that there is a need for more hypothesisdriven research by both groups of ecologists, and for more research on mechanisms driving species richness variability in aquatic systems. The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) is central to EU policy on marine (biodiversity) conservation in European Seas. Yet, as with the EU Guest editor: Koen Martens / Emerging Trends in Aquatic Ecology