Journal of Ecoacoustics

The Journal of Ecoacoustics (JEA) is online again after one year of forced interruption due to changing our Publisher, after an economic failure of the former host. The search for a new publisher has not been a simple matter. Despite a recent exponential growth in ecoacoustics papers spread across several high ranking journals, ecoacoustics remains a field of ecological research that continues to find difficulties meeting the interests of international publishers.

However, thanks to generous collaboration of MDPI through their JAMS platform, JEA is online again and ready to play an important role in the diffusion of ecoacoustics research. In fact, JEA aims to attract scholars in ecoacoustics by offering cheap, fast, peer reviewed publication process of relevant papers that develop ecoacoustics theories, discuss field methodologies, describe case studies in different biomes, and offer tools for monitoring and managing endangered habitats.

Ecoacoustics is a powerful discipline to describe the state of environmental health at multiple spatial scales. It can be applied on the scale of microhabitats, or to landscapes in human dominated ecosystems (metropolitan areas), as well as in remote, intact natural areas. Thanks to the use of automatic sensors, the application of various effective metrics, and supervised and unsupervised data mining approaches, it is now possible to collect and efficiently process big data, and extract relevant information about the functional components and health of the environment.

The threat to biodiversity caused by climate change adds to the unprecedented human impacts throughout most of the world’s ecosystems, forcing scientists to seek new approaches to analyze environmental conditions and catch the first symptoms of environmental stress before it is too late.

Sounds from nature are one of the best proxies to carry out the necessary screening for a proactive action aimed at mitigating negative effects on species and ecosystems. JEA’s strategy is to circulate research on the ecology of sounds, help scholars to publish relevant papers on this subject with a largely cultural perspective, and produce results that can be used to develop guidelines for a consolidated theory of ecoacoustics as a scientific discipline and an information base for future investigations, conservation, and management.

In particular, it is important to publish thematic issues in emerging fields including: impact of agroforestry in the tropics, sea trades and noise impact on marine mammals, first signals of climatic changes in acoustic communities and acoustic habitats, etc. Every one is invited to suggest themes and to offer to serve as a guest editor.

The good intentions of this editorial project must be applied efficiently, taking advantage of support from the bioacoustics and ecoacoustics communities. For this reason, I ask all people working in this field to step up and help JEA become a reference in the ecoacoustics field. We are aware that a young journal cannot compete for impact factor with older journals but with the help of the entire ecoacoustics community we can increase the journal impact very quickly with retrospective benefits for all.