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A new PLOS Water Collection in partnership with SUSE: ‘Urbanization and Waterway Ecology: Instream and Beyond’

Guillaume Wright Collection Ecology Water
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Image by Mateo Scoggins

Urban, suburban, and exurban land covers a large and rapidly growing footprint on our planet. Because human development has concentrated around waterways for transportation, water supply, and waste removal, development has reshaped natural waterways, riparian corridors, and the broader landscape. While waterways provide essential benefits for society, urbanization imposes significant pressure on aquatic ecosystems. Over the past four decades, our understanding of the effects of urbanization on aquatic ecosystems has grown tremendously, highlighting both consistent negative impacts to ecosystem structure and function as well as variability in effects among and within cities across the globe.  

Ongoing research in urban waterway ecology allows us to better understand and predict the impacts of urbanization, and guides restoration and management activities in these social-ecological systems. More recent approaches to urban stream management and restoration involve communities in transdisciplinary research and restoration to set and assess the varied goals of watershed restoration projects. To equitably include transdisciplinary teams in successful restoration efforts, research must be openly available.  

The Symposium for Urbanization and Stream Ecology (SUSE) and the Urban Chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science are excited to partner with PLOS Water for an ongoing collection on Urbanization and Waterway Ecology: Instream and Beyond providing valuable new information, predictions, and tools that assess and expand the portfolio of management practices and decision-making for practitioners, researchers and communities across the globe. Papers in this collection include those derived from periodic SUSE workshops (held every 3 years) as well as contributions from invited authorship. Any proposed articles will be assessed for suitability by the SUSE publications committee.

Proposal and submission deadlines

Researchers interested in contributing to the next collection should submit their proposals by 31st August 2026, and then submit your manuscripts directly to PLOS Water by 15th March 2027. For proposals, please complete this form or otherwise send an email to Sarah Ledford ([email protected]). Topics may include but are not limited to understanding the effects of urbanization on aquatic ecosystems; and approaches, tools, and responses to urban waterway restoration and management. 

For questions about the series or to express interest in contributing, please contact the SUSE7 publications committee: 

Ready to submit your research to this collection in PLOS Water? Follow our step-by-step guide to the submission process, and ensure you enter ‘Urbanization and Stream Ecology’ in the free-text field for collections during the submission process of your article. 

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