Avian Conservation and Ecology

Avian Conservation and Ecology is an open-access, fully electronic scientific journal, sponsored by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists and Bird Studies Canada. We publish papers that are scientifically rigorous and relevant to the bird conservation community in a cost-effective electronic approach that makes them freely available to scientists and the public in real-time. ACE is a fully indexed ISSN journal that welcomes contributions from scientists all over the world. While the name of the journal implies a publication niche of conservation AND ecology, we think the theme of conservation THROUGH ecology provides a better sense of our purpose. As such, we are particularly interested in contributions that use a scientifically sound and rigorous approach to the achievement of avian conservation as revealed through insights into ecological principles and processes. Papers are expected to fall along a continuum of pure conservation and management at one end to more pure ecology at the other but our emphasis will be on those contributions with direct relevance to conservation objectives. Additional information on types of papers considered: We encourage papers on birds at any ecological level (individuals to ecosystems) that have a strong hypothesis driven approach to conservation problems. Papers in ACE will ideally have clearly articulated hypotheses and predictions laid out in the Introduction. However, we also recognize the value of descriptive studies that clearly define the value of the findings to real-world conservation objectives. In such cases, the onus will be on the authors to demonstrate that their descriptive study can provide significant value within the scope of current knowledge and future research directions. Papers on the natural history of species will typically not be considered. However, behavioral studies are welcomed if they have a bearing on conservation issues (e.g., whether and how extinction risk covaries with mating systems and human activities, and why it might be expected to; or whether and how dispersal is affected by habitat alteration, and why it might be expected to). Impact studies are welcomed if the consequences of documented effects are examined in a mechanistic ecological context (e.g., whether and how landscape-level habitat alteration by industrial forestry alters processes affecting population growth or community dynamics, and why it might be expected to). Studies conducted in areas essentially free of human influence are relevant if they represent controls against which impacted areas are compared. They may also represent model systems of ecological phenomena with consequences for conservation, provided that the connection to conservation is explicitly stated in the rationale for the research. We recognize the increasing scope of statistical treatments of data that range among frequentist, information theoretic and Bayesian approaches. However, we caution authors against the approach of rejecting trivial null hypotheses as these usually provide little insight into the support for the alternate hypothesis unless conducted in a strict experimental framework.