Right after his paper – looking at the drivers of community structure and macroinvertebrate community metrics in New Zealand – had been accepted for publication in PeerJ, Jonathan Tonkin shared the news with the community. We were very happy to hear he had a great experience with us! We published his article today, and we went back to him as we wanted to hear more about his work.
PJ: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
JT: I’m currently a postdoc in Germany at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt. I’m based in the River Ecology and Conservation Department in the small town of Gelnhausen east of Frankfurt city. Prior to this, I spent a year at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, lecturing Environmental Science, which is where I started working on this current paper. My research is focused around what promotes and maintains biodiversity, particularly within stream ecosystems. Moving forward, I’m planning to look at river and stream ecosystems within the framework of metacommunity theory, paying particular attention to the influence of flow regimes and the dendritic nature of river networks.
PJ: Can you briefly explain the research you published in PeerJ?
JT: I was interested to know how well simple and commonly used stream invertebrate community metrics can be explained by environmental variation in relatively pristine streams, and whether the best drivers of community metrics were similar to those best linked with community structure. The reason behind this is that simple metrics are often used in stream ecology to summarize biota’s response to coarse environmental gradients. The problem though is that it may hide more complex responses, at the community level, for instance, and may ignore the role of natural underlying finer-scale variation in environmental conditions.
I looked at this in 47 relatively pristine streams in the central North Island of New Zealand and found high levels of variation could be explained for both the metric-based and community-based approaches. The strength of these links highlights the broad range of environmental conditions in these pristine streams that are shaping the invertebrate communities. The environmental influences were relatively similar using both approaches, with canopy cover playing a strong role in each case. These results emphasize two key points particularly important for biomonitoring applications: firstly, the importance of considering natural environmental variation underlying coarse environmental gradients; and, secondly, the role of canopy cover at masking the impact of stressors on stream invertebrate communities.
PJ: Where do you hope to go from here?
JT: Well, my current projects involve Asia, Europe, Oceania and Africa, so perhaps somewhere in South America (and not just the data)! On a more serious note though, I’m moving my research towards studying rivers and streams from a metacommunity perspective, particularly in relation to flow regimes and river network structure.
PJ: Why did you choose to reproduce the complete peer-review history of your article?
JT: Why not? It’s good to have it there for readers if they want to see the full history of the paper. It also gives credit to the reviewers who may have (and did in my case) help to improve the manuscript. I’m a big fan of the current push for open science.
PJ: How would you describe your experience of our submission/review process?
JT: At risk of sounding like an undercover PeerJ marketer, it was really straightforward and clear. All the processes are in place to save any hassle down the line and the editorial staff certainly does a great job of helping with submissions at each step. The submission system is flawless. Not forgetting the reviewers and academic editor too, of course; they were really helpful.
PJ: Did you get any comments from your colleagues about your publication with PeerJ?
JT: Not yet. I’ve certainly spread the word of how great the publishing and pricing model is though. I love that open access publishing can be affordable and so professional at the same time.
PJ: In conclusion, how would you describe PeerJ in three words?
JT: The… way… forward!
PJ: Many thanks for your time!
JT: My pleasure. I’ll be back!
Experience the PeerJ process for yourself, engage with PeerJ articles or preprints, and publish for free!