AMBIO celebrates 40 years

Abstract

In 2011 AMBIO celebrates 40 years of disseminating research findings to an international audience with very wide interests in the human environment. This issue is representative of the breadth of topics that have been published throughout the years; it opens up with a comprehensive review of the negative impact of anthropogenic disturbances on marine ecosystems in the Persian Gulf, followed by two papers on mercury contamination and four papers on how mammals and birds respond to human factors in a rapidly changing world. The issue concludes with several papers dealing with China’s grave environmental challenges as a result of the strong growth in the Chinese economy. During 15 years AMBIO was translated into Chinese and distributed within China. Since 2009, this cooperation has ended but I am particularly pleased that AMBIO continues to receive so many well-crafted contributions from Chinese researchers. To find viable solutions for the future, an open scientific debate is of paramount importance. Looking ahead, during the next-coming two years AMBIO will publish several Special Issues and Special Reports on environmental and ecological changes in the Arctic and the Baltic Sea. These have been recurrent themes in AMBIO but in the face of climate change the problems are more acute than ever. The third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability will take place at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm 16–19 May 2011. Invited thinkers and experts will discuss the intertwined challenges of climate change and ecosystem change. New approaches to the way we govern the world’s social and ecological systems will be formulated into guidelines and recommendations to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro 2012. AMBIO will highlight the outcome of the Nobel Laureate Symposium in a coming issue. During 2010, we have streamlined our publishing and editorial procedures to meet the expectations of rapid, high-quality peer review and publishing. On average, a first decision on a manuscript can be expected within three months and—after final acceptance—the manuscript will be published online within one month and in a print issue within six months. We wish to express our heartfelt gratitude to the more than 170 reviewers (see Reviewer Acknowledgments in this issue), who during 2010 provided excellent support to the AMBIO editors by assessing the scientific quality of submitted manuscripts. We continuously fine-tune our routines, so please send me an e-mail if you have suggestions on how to improve AMBIO even further. Our work has paid off and the number of e-mail alert subscribers steadily increases as well as the number of AMBIO-articles downloaded from www.springer.com/13280. Please continue to submit your best papers to AMBIO!