 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
"Foley to Steer New Course for Earth Interactions"
Published in Eos, 17 September 2002
Jon Foley, director of the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin, recently began his 3-year term as editor of Earth Interactions and plans to steer the interdisciplinary journal in a new editorial direction. The electronic-only journal, published jointly by AGU and the American Meteorological Society (AMS), was initially launched in 1997.
The new focus of Earth Interactions (EI) aims for the e-journal to become a comprehensive source of information for Earth system science researchers focused on human interactions with the natural world, Foley said. His objective for the journal is to help revitalize it as the first and foremost publication for such multidisciplinary science, recognizing the discoveries being made at the interfaces of the physical, biological, and social sciences.
"There is a growing community of people working across the traditional disciplines aiming to understand the linkages between different parts of the Earth system," Foley said. "Universities are increasingly turning out graduates that are more interdisciplinary and don't fit into individual scientific topics and journals. I think EI will speak to that audience."
These scientists with multiple job titles and responsibilities and whose expertise covers, among other fields, biology, hydrology, oceanography, and atmospheric science now have to read dozens of journals across the sciences to follow new developments, Foley said. As a member of that cadre of scientists, he keenly understands the need for an outlet to link new developments to a broad audience looking at Earth's processes.
"Earth Interactions will fill a need in the scientific community and provide a place where people can publish these new findings," Foley said. "We're following the interesting new interdisciplinary science that is happening in the geosciences."
Earth Interactions grew out of a collaboration among several scientific societies in 1992 with initial support from NASA. EI's initial mission was to broadly study the interactions between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere in the context of global change. The journal provided AGU and AMS with a testbed for experimenting with ways to take traditional journals beyond the printed page. In 2001, a reconstituted editorial advisory board shifted the journal's focus away from showcasing innovative electronic publishing capabilities since both societies had by that time moved to routine online journal publishing.
As editor, Foley is interested in publishing articles that, for example, investigate how changes in climate might be amplified or diminished by changes in the ecosystem, such as deforestation; analyze the effects of the growing global population on land and water degradation; and study how changing ecological systems might contribute to human health and disease. Other subjects will be drawn from interdisciplinary workshops and from suggestions provided by the editorial board in the future, said Foley.
The new editorial focus will fill a publishing niche for the wide-ranging interdisciplinary environmental studies that are both his expertise and his passion, Foley said. "This is the type of journal I'd like to read," he concluded. "That is exciting to me. And it's also the kind of outlet where I would publish some of my own research. I hope others feel the same way."
Foley, an AGU member since 1992, began his career as a professor at the UW–Madison campus after completing his Ph.D. in atmospheric science there in 1993. He has authored or co-authored nearly 50 research articles that primarily focus on the use of computer models to analyze and simulate changes in global ecological, hydrological, and atmospheric processes.
The Maine native is a current member of the AGU Committee on Global Environmental Change. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Clinton in 1997.
Jonathan Lifland, AGU Science Writer