Guidelines for Authors
Dear Colleagues!
Fund for Support and Development of Protected Areas "Bear Land" invites you to publish your research materials in a scientific journal “Nature Conservation Research". It aims for communicating results and novel ideas in research of biodiversity at Protected Areas, conservation of populations of threatened species of organisms.
This journal has no any charges.
"Nature Conservation Research" is indexed in Web of Science Core Collection (database Emerging Sources Citation Index), Scopus, Russian Science Citation Index database, DOAJ, CrossRef, ResearchGate, and others.
"Nature Conservation Research" has an ISSN 2500-008X.
Publication frequency is 4 issues per year.
Starting since March 2021, we don't send hard copies of issues of the journal Nature Conservation Research to authors.
The main requirements for submitted manuscripts: a manuscript must 1) either be based on studies conducted (exclusively or predominantly) within Protected Area(s), or 2) be devoted (exclusively or predominantly) to rare and/or threatened species; 3) a manuscript must be of interest to an international readership, even if its immediate scope is local.
The main criteria for submitting manuscripts
1. A manuscript should not have an exclusively descriptive character, i.e. it should include analysis of data obtained and discussion of the obtained results.
2. A manuscript should be interesting for an international (not only national or local) readership, even if its immediate scope is local.
3. A manuscript should include a comparison of obtained authors' data with similar publications from other regions of the world (as widely as possible and needed).
4. We do not publish papers containing solely species lists for any area, although manuscripts using such data to address important questions of nature conservation may be considered.
5. The journal «Nature Conservation Research» doesn't consider publishing the additions to the flora/fauna of a certain Protected Area being a result of continuous monitoring of this area. ONLY final results of the long-term inventory of flora/fauna could be considered. It means that results of preliminary or too short-term (one field season or year) studies are avoided, preferring the publication of long-term research results. An exception may be results of particular value that are of interest to an international audience.
SCOPE
– Biodiversity and conservation of rare and threatened species.
– Inventory of living organisms in Protected Areas and other territories.
– Study and conservation of objects of non-living nature in Protected Areas.
– Long-term monitoring of environment components in Protected Areas.
– New concepts, methods and techniques for nature conservation.
– Anthropogenic transformation of natural ecosystems, invasive alien species in Protected Areas.
– Paleontological studies in Protected Areas.
– Ecosystems management for nature conservation.
– The legal basis for nature conservation and management.
– History and development prospects of reserve management and studies.
General information for authors of journal "Nature Conservation Research"
Journal considers manuscripts of following types and volumes:
1. Review Articles (up to 30 pages).
2. Research Articles (15–25 pages).
3. Short Communications (up to 7 pages).
4. Chronicle, Book Reviews (up to 5–7 pages).
5. Research Notes (up to 2.0–2.5 pages) [new records for fauna/flora of a country/continent, world, etc.].
The volume of manuscripts can be increased by agreement with the Editorial Board.
1. Journal “Nature Conservation Research" publishes papers written in Russian or English. But papers in English are preferred.
2. All materials must be submitted in electronic version. List of these includes:
a. file of manuscript prepared in Microsoft Word and named by first author name (example: ivanov.doc);
b. file with information about authors (see example below), containing the author(s) name, contact details (affiliation, position, email and postal addresses) and iD ORCID of each author; file must be named by the name of the first author with the prefix -attrib (example: Ivanov-attrib.doc):
EXAMPLE: Anatoliy A. Khapugin, PhD, Senior Researcher of the Joint Directorate of the Mordovia State Nature Reserve and National Park “Smolny" (430005, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Krasnaya Street, 30); Researcher of the Tyumen State University (625003, Russia, Tyumen, Volodarskogo Street, 6); iD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6059-2779; e-mail: hapugin88@yandex.ru;
c.graphics files should be saved as one of the following formats: JPEG or TIFF. Each file must contain one picture and be named as follows: fig1.jpg, fig2.jpg, etc., which numbered in the order in which they appear in the manuscript).
3.The manuscript that is sent to the journal “Nature Conservation Research" should be carefully edited by authors.
4.Editorial board has the rights to decline the papers which have formatting errors or do not correspond to the journal thematics.
5.All files for submission of manuscript must be sent to the email address: ncr.journal@yandex.ru or additional hapugin88@yandex.ru.
6. If the authors want, they may provide a list of potential reviewers.
Download Author Guidelines: RUS, ENG
General guidelines
Manuscripts should be submitted only in a file format WinWord.doc. At second step, the manuscript will be checked to suitability with the rules for authors of the journal “Nature Conservation Research". After this it will be sent to at least two appropriate reviewers. In a case of positive conclusion of reviewers, manuscript will be sent to the corresponding author with comments of the reviewer and editorial board for further revision. Then, author should present the corrected version of the manuscript and answers to the comments of reviewers within one month. If there is a delay with sending the corrected manuscript more than one month, the re-submission of the manuscript will be considered as a new submission.
Manuscript will be accepted for publication only after receiving the positive recommendations of all invited reviewers and agreeing the Editorial Board with their opinions. This reply must include final version of manuscript and a file with answers to the comments of reviewers. The article will be published after creation of PDF-proof and its approving by authors. After this step, any claims for formatting and content of the article will not be considered. Editorial Board will not liable for factual, spelling and stylistic errors in papers after acceptance of reply from author.
Manuscript must be compiled in the following order: manuscript title, full names of author(s), affiliation (the highest level, i.e. for example, name of an University, but not a faculty, branch, laboratory, etc.) with the country, summary, key words, main text including all figures and tables (if any) embedded in the appropriate places, acknowledgements (if any), references.
Language
The text should be checked in advance by a native speaker or by a sworn translator. Otherwise, the manuscript will be rejected or returned for its improvement. Manuscripts should be only in British English (or UK English). Be consistent throughout the manuscript. Linguistic usage should be correct. Avoid the use of the passive voice. If the quality of English is too poor, the manuscript will be sent back to the authors for improving the English.
Text
Manuscripts must include the following sections: Introduction, Material and Methods, Results, Discussion (a combined Results and Discussion section is appropriate in certain cases), Conclusions, Acknowledgements (if any), References.
Text of manuscript must be prepared in WinWord(use 12-point Times New Roman Cyr, indentation –
Manuscripts must contain only physical units and terms adopted in the International System of Units, the IUPAC nomenclature for chemical substances, geographical names consistent with modern geographical atlases. Values of a metric system should be preferably used (i.e. m, dm3 (the use of liters «l» is possible), m2 or km2). Authors should strictly follow the last edition of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and the International Code of Nomenclature of algae, fungi and plants. A species mentioned in the text for the first time must be supplied with its author(s) (for plant taxa) or author(s) and the year of publication (for animal taxa).
All abbreviations (except for commonly used) must be deciphered at the first mentioning in the text. Don't abbreviate the terms, if these abbreviations are being used a small number of times in the main text.
Species and genus names of organisms must be marked in italics. Each first mentioning of a species name within the text must be provided with author(s)' name(s) (for plants) or with author(s)' name(s) and year (for animals).
To name organisms, Latin names must be used. Avoid using common names in any languages (they can be mentioned only as supplemental data). Exclusions can be made for the organisms, names of which are used frequently in the main text. In this case, a Latin name should be used at the first mentioning in the text, while in brackets, the authors should indicate, what common name will be used in the rest main text (e.g., … Pinus sylvestris L. (hereinafter – pine) …). Latin names of plant taxa should be standardized using database Plants of the World Online (http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/).
Geographic co-ordinates should be used in decimal form, i.e. you should present them as 46.591650° N, 49.178883° E, avoiding the following form: 46°35.499' N, 49°10.733' E.
In-text citations are to be cited with author(s) and year and be placed in parentheses in strict chronological order. Examples: Vargot, 2014 (or “according to Vargot (2014)") – if this is publication of one author; Ruchin & Egorov, 2007 (or “as proposed by Ruchin & Egorov (2007)") – if this is publication of two authors; Egorov et al., 2015 (or “according to Egorov et al. (2015)") – if this is publication of three and more authors. Don't use the citations of references by their titles, like «Determinant key…, 2019»; in this case, editors should be used as authors in in-text citations, while in the section References, «(Ed.)/(Eds.)» should be added after names of editors (for Red Data Books, this requirement can be omitted). Do not use «etc.», when you list in-text citations or terms in the main text. Instead, you should write «For example,» and then list all or the most necessary in-text citations or terms, which are sufficient for the reader to understand the meaning of the sentence.
All electronic addresses (URLs) must be prepared as hyperlinks to the active web pages.
Authors must different using of a dash «–» and hyphen «-»: Dash without spaces means the interval “from–to" in numeric and character values: example: 5–7 pages. Dash with spaces is used to denote dash in a text, period of the year, etc.: examples: ... where r – radius, m; ... in July – August.... Hyphen without spaces: red-violet color, single-flowered raceme, etc.
Spaces are needed in following cases: a) between number and the dimension (example: 3.0–3.2 mm); b) to describe hybrids (example: Mentha × piperita); c) between numbers and the multiplication sign or signs of «=», «<», «>», etc. (example: 50 × 76, p = 0.005, p < 0.0001).
Spaces must not be placed in the following cases: a) between number and sign “percent" между цифрами и знаком «процент» (example: 34%); b) between number and the dimension “degree Celsius" (example:
Manuscript begins from title. It is written in bold, 14-point capital letters. Full name(s) of author(s) must be written in bold, 12 points (the full First Name, abbreviated Middle name(s), and the full Last Name). If there are two and more authors, their full names must be separated by commas.
Affiliation of each author must be written. If authors are affiliated with different organizations, it is necessary to use superscripts indicating the relevant organizations (the highest level of them, without indicating of their branches, faculties, lower-level institutions, laboratories, departments, etc.). Affiliations must be written in italics, 11 points with indicating the relevant organizations and email addresses of authors. Affiliations must be center fitted.
Title of paper, list of full names of authors must be separated by space lines and be center-fitted.
Title
The title should as short and concise as possible. At the same time, it should reflect the content of the manuscript. After the name of the studied taxon/taxa (e.g. species/genus), we recommend to indicate (in brackets) the higher taxon/taxa. To clarify the position of the study area for readers, we recommend to add in the title an indication of a country or (bio)geographical region, where the study area is situated (e.g. «… in the Mordovia State Nature Reserve, European Russia» or «…on Sakhalin island, Russian Far East»).
Summary
Text of summary must be meaningful (to reflect the main content of the paper and results of study), informative (not contain common words), structured (follow the logic of description of the results in paper), self-sufficient (without references to the publications, with clear designations, no abbreviations). Summary must be from 250 to 600 words in 10 points. The summary should not be divided to paragraphs.
Briefly, the summary structure should be conditionally presented as follows. In summary, the background and relevance of the study should be highlighted in a few sentences. The following parts of the summary are: aim of the paper could be added; data on the used materials and methods should be listed; main results obtained during the study should be added; Finally, the main conclusion(s) should be added, which can be accompanied by recommendations, assessments, suggestions, hypotheses, described in paper.
Results must be presented extremely accurately and informatively. The main theoretical and experimental results, the actual data, interconnections and patterns must be presented. At the same time, preference should be given to new results and long-term significance, important discoveries, conclusions that refute existing theories as well as data which have practical importance in author's opinion.
Key words
From 5 to 10 words (in 10 points) must be written after summary in alphabetical order. Do not use the key words, which are presented in the title. Don't use too complex sentences as key words (for example, use two key words «Barguzinsky Bay», and «Lake Baikal» instead of one key word «Barguzinsky Bay of Lake Baikal»).
Manuscript structure
Introduction. The section should provide an adequate background of the submitted research and indicate the main objectives of the conducted investigation. For this purpose, the section Introduction should include three conditional parts. First, the Introduction should highlight the international (and, additionally, national) relevance of topics related to the topic of the submitted paper in the light of modern literature. Secondly, it is necessary to show the research background (pre-history) of the submitted study in the past. Finally (preferably, in a separate paragraph), the purpose of the study and the research tasks should be indicated. We encourage the presenting of the research hypotheses.
Material and Methods. Provide sufficient details to allow the work to be reproduced by an independent researcher. Methods that are already published should be summarized, and indicated by a reference. If quoting directly from a previously published method, use quotation marks and also cite the source. Any modifications to existing methods should also be described. The description of the study area should be included exactly in this section (sub-section Study area). For each used software, please, indicate the citation to the related reference or to its producer (manufacturer). For each used equipment, the producer (manufacturer) and the country of production should be indicated.
Results. The section contains all of the data to support (or refute) the hypothesis that was proposed in the introduction section. Results should be clear and concise.
Discussion. The Discussion should explain the significance of the results (but not repeat them) and place them into a broader context. For this purpose, the obtained data should be explained and discussed with the use of literature data of both international and national scale. A combined Results and Discussion section is often appropriate.
Conclusions. The main conclusions should be present in this short section Conclusions. The section should contain the main conclusions (without their numeration) based on the discussion of results, while it should not repeat data presented in sections of Results and Discussion.
No more than three levels of sub-sections is allowed in the manuscript. Their formatting is demonstrated below.
Section title
The title of the first-level sub-section
The title of the second-level sub-section
The title of the third-level sub-section
The use of the names of Protected Areas and useful sources
If authors use names of National Parks, State Nature Reserves or other Protected Areas, they should check the correctness of their names. The name of each Protected Area should be accompanied with the full spelling of its status, such as «State Nature Reserve», «National Park», «Sanctuary», etc. Examples: «Kaluzhskie Zaseki State Nature Reserve», «Chavash Varmane National Park», etc. For mentioning a Protected Area, it is not suitable to use only its status, e.g. «The research was conducted in the Reserve». It should be written as «The research was conducted in the Prisursky State Nature Reserve».Before submitting of manuscript(s) to the «Nature Conservation Research» authors should check what was published earlier relative to their manuscript in order to avoid both plagiarism and incompleteness of data in manuscript. Authors may do it through following sources: CyberLeninka (http://cyberleninka.ru/), eLIBRARY (http://elibrary.ru/), CrossRef (http://search.crossref.org/) DOAJ (https://doaj.org/), ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/directory/publications).
Figures
Graphical material (graphics, schemes, photography, pictures) must be embedded into text of manuscript after the first mention of them. Each Figure should represent a single illustration instead of the set of illustrations embedded into the main text. The total amount of graphical materials (figures, tables, etc.) should not exceed 35% of the total volume of the main text (from Introduction until Acknowledgements [i.e. excluding section References]). All figures must be numbered in the order in which they appear in the manuscript (e.g. Fig. 1, Fig. 2). In multi-part figures, each part should be labeled (e.g. Fig. 1a, Fig. 2b). All figures must have appropriate legends. Each Figure caption must end with a dot.
Please provide the highest quality figure format possible. Please be sure that all imported scanned material is scanned at the appropriate resolution: 1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for color. In a case of color figures, Color illustrations should be prepared so that the information is not distorted in the black-and-white printing. Figures must be saved in separate files as one of the following formats: JPEG or TIFF. The names of axes and other labels/designation within the figure body should be presented on the same language, which is used for the main text of the manuscript.
The Figure caption should be self-explanatory and self-sufficient, i.e. understandable without referring to the main text. For instance, use «The location of study plots in the National Park «Smolny» and in European Russia» instead «Study area». All abbreviations and statistical symbols, presented on Figures, should designated in the Figure caption, regardless of whether they have already been designated in other parts of the main text.If a Figure is complex (i.e. includes a set of illustrations (e.g. graphs, plots, photos)), each element (sub-figure) should be indicated by Latin letters (A, B, C, D etc.). They must be decrypted in the figure caption.
Figures must be center fitted; figure captions must be width fitted (without indentation). Each Figure should be separated by empty lines from the main text above and below of it.
For example (according to Fig. 5 from https://dx.doi.org/10.24189/ncr.2023.013),