Svalbard Biodiversity: New Insights for Conservation

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on biodiversity of Svalbard environments. Similar to other Arctic areas, Svalbard is among the most sensitive regions of the global climate system and the most affected by climate change. Climate change, extreme weather events, and anthropogenic disturbances affect terrestrial and marine Svalbard ecosystems, including their biodiversity. However, we still have a poor understanding of species diversity of Svalbard environments, and its response to climate change and human impact. This lack of knowledge together with unknown responses of species to changes in biotic and abiotic habitat conditions, as well as unidentified interactions between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, remain a major problem in addressing the challenge of biodiversity loss. Therefore, this Special Issue aims at collecting research papers on the biodiversity of terrestrial and maritime ecosystems of Svalbard as well as on potential impacts of undergoing environmental changes on Svalbard fauna and flora.

We welcome manuscripts in all fields related to Svalbard biodiversity, species ecology, and conservation. We encourage all type of manuscripts (i.e., comprehensive reviews, case studies, and original research articles) dealing with theoretical aspects, observation data analysis, monitoring and predictive modeling. Potential topics include:

- Species diversity in terrestrial and maritime ecosystems;

- Environmental drivers associated with species diversity;

- Species range dynamics;

- Species adaptations;

- Invasive and alien species;

- Effects of climate change and extreme weather events on species diversity and distributions;

- Anthropogenic influences on species diversity;

- Monitoring of species diversity, ecosystem processes, and environmental drivers by experimental manipulation of selected drivers;

- Others (related).

Submitted manuscripts will be subjected to regular publication requirements of Sustainability (please see “Instruction for Authors”) and will follow the reviewing and publication processes policies of the journal.

Dr. Paulina Wietrzyk-Pełka
Dr. Volker Otte
Dr. Fumino Maruo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• alien species
• anthropopressure
• arctic ecosystem
• climate change
• ecosystem functioning
• extreme weather events
• freshwater ecosystem
• species diversity
• native species
• marine ecosystem
• species preservation
• terrestrial ecosystem