Advancing Frontiers, with a retrospective

Abstract

editorial ISSN 1948‐6596 Advancing Frontiers, with a retrospective The first issue of a new volume of Frontiers of Bio‐ geography, following soon after a Biennial meet‐ ing of the International Biogeography Society (IBS), provides a timely opportunity to take stock of achievements and to chart the new course for the journal. We aim to do this in two installments: first a brief retrospective herein, followed by a prospective in the next issue. Frontiers of Biogeography is now seven is‐ sues, and not quite two years, old (the first issue was published in September 2009). During this period, we have maintained an average of over 30 pages per issue of diverse content, including opin‐ ions and perspectives, book reviews, news and comment on the current literature, and updates for the IBS membership. That level of output, al‐ though small by the standards of an established journal, is a testament to the support of IBS mem‐ bers in submitting articles and a dedicated edito‐ rial team. We take this opportunity to thank this team of editors, who are listed inside the cover of all the issues of the journal. Many of them are early‐career scientists with a great enthusiasm for our subject: key members of the next generation of leading biogeographers. It is great to have such dynamic, motivated people involved. A key part of our mission is inherited from the antecedent IBS Newsletter: to abet communi‐ cation among all the members of IBS. The mem‐ bership corner remains a pillar of that mission, in partnership with the IBS blog, facebook, and twit‐ ter sites. We have been able to bring some of the latest content from the diverse biogeography lit‐ erature to your laptop, including discussion of top‐ ics in the peer‐reviewed literature. With the Wiley –Blackwell biogeography journals discontinuing their book reviews about four years ago, Frontiers is now the place to look for reviews of, and infor‐ mation about, books in our field; the recent ap‐ pointment of Markus Eichhorn as Book Reviews Editor has made this a strong feature of the jour‐ nal. We also bring early delivery of ideas gestating within the minds of a series of highly regarded interviewees; the interview with Robert E. Ricklefs in this issue brings up to date the series on Alfred Russel Wallace Award winners. In this vein, the current issue again engages with some of the very latest in biogeography in a series of reports from the 5 th Biennial Interna‐ tional Conference of the IBS, convened in Herak‐ lion, Crete. Each report provides a summary of cutting‐edge topics within the field, but we sug‐ gest there are gems hidden in these reports that emerge most clearly when reading the entire is‐ sue’s contents in quick succession, regardless of speciality. Several common themes spring out. To choose just two examples, the importance of body size (see the summaries of the Two Lenses, Hot Topics, and Marine Biogeography symposia) and the role of ecology in species distributions (Two Lenses and Marine Biogeography symposia) have a large presence across nominally distant disci‐ plines. Additionally, the Conservation Biology and Palaeoecology summaries explicitly draw links between symposia. These glimpses of transversal‐ ity are evidence that, by bringing together bio‐ geographers from different areas of research, the IBS meetings are facilitating a multidisciplinary exchange from which conceptual syntheses can emerge. But also, reading the book reviews and interview, we are led to consider the merits of practising biogeography in different ways: focus‐ ing on place, question or taxon, using shallow sampling with great breadth or sampling intensely with depth. In this issue we have the added op‐ portunity of viewing one symposium through the eyes of both the organizers and two student at‐ tendees (fittingly, this is the Two Lenses sympo‐ sium on biogeography and ecology). The diversity of points of view, conceptual and methodological approaches and research topics provided by these discussions, in print, represents the vitality of the meeting, the society and the discipline they seek to represent. Thus, as IBS continues to establish itself as a scientific society, Frontiers of Biogeography also is evolving to take on a broader role in communicat‐ ing biogeography. Our long‐standing series of con‐ tributed opinion and perspective articles (now highlighted on the Frontiers of Biogeography frontiers of biogeography 3.1, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society