With more than 24,000 extant species, the Actinopterygii is the most diverse group of vertebrates. This astonishing diversity represents not only an underexploited resource for research focused on these fishes but also a source of valuable information for comparative biology and medical science. Although the technical advances in morphology concomitant with revolutionary phylogenetic concepts have presented many challenges in ichthyology for the past half-century, spectacular progress in DNA technology provides other opportunities for research using multiple-gene or genomic data for the study of biological questions, particularly those related to the evolution of fishes. In this article, we discuss how ichthyology is changing in this new era, and how the emerging phylogenomic approach has been used to study species diversification in relation to gene and genome duplications and to resolve the complex evolutionary history of ray-finned fishes.

Recent decades have seen a remarkable increase in the number of studies examining biodiversity in nature. Beta diversity—the turnover of community composition in space and time—has received particular attention. Here, I discuss recent findings in spatial and temporal turnover along abiotic and biotic gradients at two different extents. Turnover in space and time seem to exhibit similar scale dependency along latitudinal gradients; turnover is faster in the tropics at narrow study extents, but the pattern is reversed at broad extents as turnover accelerates nearer to the poles. Moreover, organisms at high trophic positions have higher turnover rates in space at broad study extents than do organisms at low trophic positions, but trophic position does not affect temporal turnover rates. Future studies that simultaneously examine variation in community composition in space, time, and along environmental gradients would shed more light on the mechanistic basis of community organization.

Governmental entities are responsible for managing and conserving large numbers of lake, river, and wetland ecosystems that can be addressed only rarely on a case-by-case basis. We present a system for predictive classification modeling, grounded in the theoretical foundation of landscape limnology, that creates a tractable number of ecosystem classes to which management actions may be tailored. We demonstrate our system by applying two types of predictive classification modeling approaches to develop nutrient criteria for eutrophication management in 1998 north temperate lakes. Our predictive classification system promotes the effective management of multiple ecosystems across broad geographic scales by explicitly connecting management and conservation goals to the classification modeling approach, considering multiple spatial scales as drivers of ecosystem dynamics, and acknowledging the hierarchical structure of freshwater ecosystems. Such a system is critical for adaptive management of complex mosaics of freshwater ecosystems and for balancing competing needs for ecosystem services in a changing world.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factor has become an important standard for assessing journal quality. Here we propose that impact factors may be subject to inflation analogous to changes in monetary prices in economics. The possibility of inflation came to light as a result of the observation that papers published today tend to cite more papers than those published a decade ago. We analyzed citation data from 75,312 papers from 70 ecological journals published during 1998–2007. We found that papers published in 2007 cited an average of seven more papers than those published a decade earlier. This increase accounts for about 80% of the observed impact factor inflation rate of 0.23. In examining the 70 journals we found that nearly 50% showed increases in their impact factors, but at rates lower than the background inflation rate. Therefore, although those journals appear to be increasing in quality as measured by the impact factor, they are actually failing to keep pace with inflation.

Wildfire is a critical land management issue in the western United States. Efforts to mitigate the effects of altered fire regimes have led to debate over ecological restoration versus species conservation framed at the conjuncture of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their respective management regimes. Fire-related management activities may disrupt watershed processes and degrade habitats of sensitive fishes. However, the restoration of forest structure, process, and functionality, including more natural fire regimes, might also benefit longer-term habitat complexity and the persistence of species and populations that are now only remnants of once-larger and more diverse habitat networks. Common language, clear communication of goals and objectives, and spatially explicit analyses of objectives will help identify conflicts and convergences of opportunities to enable more collaborative management. We explore this integration in the context of native fisheries and wildfire, but expect the approach to be relevant in other settings as well.