TREE was launched in July 1986, at just the right moment. The 1980s were an auspicious time for ecology and evolutionary biology: DNA fingerprinting had burst onto the scene in 1984 and, by the late 1980s, had become an important tool in behavioural ecological studies; molecular ecology soon became a familiar term (even spawning a journal of its own, as did several other nascent fields, such as restoration ecology). Population ecology had been reinvigorated by chaos theory, and metapopulation biology was emerging as an important discipline in its own right, combining elements from both the ecological and evolutionary arenas. Technical breakthroughs in remote sensing were gathering momentum. The importance of long-term data was becoming more widely appreciated, and some of the major projects initiated at that time in various parts of the world continue to yield new insights into the functioning of ecological communities. Time-series data in population ecology have increased our understanding of species interactions, especially plant–herbivore, predator–prey and host–pathogen and/or parasite interactions, and the effects of climate and the environment on all of these.On the evolutionary side, palaeobiology, systematics and phylogenetic studies were given impetus by the development of molecular sequencing techniques – again, a new industry of the 1980s, much of which was spawned by the appropriation of PCR for evolutionary studies. Research on human evolution profited increasingly from the application of molecular techniques, especially mtDNA sequencing. Studies of sexual selection and life-history evolution were in a particularly vigorous phase. Coevolutionary and biogeographic research had burgeoned, and evo-devo was emerging as a key bridge between palaeontology and genetics. Genomics and proteomics, let alone the post-genomic era, were a distant dream at that point, yet evolutionary biology and ecology were poised to take advantage as these new technologies unfolded.With these developments and their antecedents came increasing levels of specialization for ecological and evolutionary researchers. Hence, the time was ripe for the launch of a journal that aimed to provide review and comment in all these areas, to keep readers abreast of what was going on outside their immediate speciality, and even to alert them to potentially fruitful synergies with other subdisciplines. TREE was conceived (by David Bousfield, the Editor of Trends in Neurosciences) along the same lines as its older sisters in the Trends series, the first of which had been Trends in Biochemical Sciences (TiBS), launched a decade earlier. I remembered from graduate days the buzz from the biochemistry lab along the corridor on the arrival of each monthly issue of TiBS, and hoped to achieve the same for ecologists and evolutionary biologists. The publishing model of editorially driven monthly review magazines, containing commissioned rather than unsolicited content, was largely pioneered by the Trends series. Each new launch, including TREE, benefited hugely from the advice and guidance of the editorial and production teams from the other titles in the same building (and, at the end of each day, in the same pub). The content of TREE itself in the early days relied heavily on advice from the Editorial Board, whose role was (and still is) to provide the Editor with ideas for authors and articles on emerging topics. The office equipment (for all eight Trends journals) comprised three Apricot computers (monopolized by the two people who knew how to use them), a handful of electric typewriters (one of which had memory capacity for a whole line of text), a telex machine and a fax; manuscripts and referees' reports were all received by regular mail, awaited with desperate excitement as the copy deadlines for each monthly issue loomed.In 2006, the state of the environment is a cause for increasing international anxiety. Ecology, palaeoecology and evolutionary biology have had an increasingly important part in understanding and developing responses to the deepening environmental problems of the new century. For example, the ecological consequences of climate change were featured in a special issue of TREE in September 1990; the collection of reviews surveyed biological effects of climate change at a broad range of evolutionary and ecological timescales. Since then, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has risen by 30 ppm (almost 10%), yet the themes of those review articles have not dated. Although the state of the science has advanced over the past 15 years, and the problems have become more urgent to address, the questions and approaches set out in that issue remain highly relevant. Likewise, many of the current directions in conservation biology, invasion biology and restoration ecology can be traced to seeds sown during the 1980s.We can confidently expect that the next 20 years of ecological and evolutionary research will be as intellectually exciting as the last, even as the environmental challenges become greater, and that TREE will be there to chronicle them all.
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Mar 19, 2007
Zhiheng Wang + 2
Open Access