Plants and processes in wetlands: A background

It is easy to gain an impression from the recent contents of Australian scientific journals dealing with ecological research that little attention is paid to the botanical ecology of Australia's inland wetlands. Less than 1% of the papers published in key Australian ecological journals over 1987-93 dealt with some aspect of the vegetation ecology of these environments. Yet over the period 1982-94 research on this topic accounted for up to 23% of the papers presented at annual conferences of the two major Australian scientific societies to which Australian limnologists are likely to belong. This discrepancy indicates that wetland vegetation is the subject of a considerable research effort by Australian limnologists, but that few of their research findings are published in refereed Australian journals. Analyses of the references cited in key review articles suggests that refereed journals outside Australia cannot account fully for the 'missing' publications: we demonstrate that much research is placed in the largely inaccessible 'grey literature' published by government departments and the like. It is also possible that some research is destined never to be published. This imbalance between the intensity of the research effort and the history of publication in Australian refereed journals prompted local scientists involved in wetland research to participate in a Special Issue dedicated to the botanical and process-oriented aspects of wetland ecology.