Weeding Out Best Practices recall the British physician cum theater and opera director Jonathan Miller in the first episode of a public television series on “Madness” speaking to the word’s definition. As to the relativity of any psychological condition (i.e., “crazy” vs “eccentric”), he remarked something to the effect that a rose bush in a potato field is a weed. In the context of agriculture and biology, one could also conclude that the potatoes were probably not indigenous to the field in the first place, making them a sort of bioinvasive species. While this logical progression seems to differ against thoughts of zebra mussels, kudzu, or various predatory fish and reptiles, certainly the conversion of land to agricultural use is very different from how that land would have naturally proceeded. In this issue’s cover Feature, Ditomaso et al. discuss the bioinvasive potential of biofuel crops (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es100640y). They note that the very traits that make a species a potential biofuel (e.g. hardiness, need for minimal cultivation), make it a potentially bioinvasive species that could overrun the nearby countryside. Farming certainly changes environmental balances, as modeled and investigated in ES&T with some frequency. For example, Legros et al. investigate the connection between copper (Cu) speciation and budgets due to using pig slurry for field fertilizer (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es101651w). Specific again to biofuel potentials, Ng et al. consider how nitrate (NO3-) fluxes might affect water quality upon miscanthus cropping (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es9039677). The complexity of these problems seems to grow, but it is good that all the variables are being considered prior to implementation. How decisions through the years have had this approach arrive and how environmental policies have evolved is why we made a call for our upcoming January 1, 2011 issue on environmental policy. Content for that issue has started to populate
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10.1021/es102783h
2010 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 09/13/2010
our Web site in the form of As Soon As Publishable (ASAP) articles. I urge you to take advantage of our search tools to uncover topics of interest in ES&T or any other ACS publication. Note that the research articles highlighted in these Managing Editor Comments (MECs) are indicated by digital object identifiers (DOIs), as the intended issue of appearance is not finalized at the time of writing. Occasionally there are changes in production, and the articles do not appear in the issue in question: for example research noted in the September 1, 2010 MEC (Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1021/es102631b) appeared in the August 15, 2010 issue. As the ASAP is the article of record, the DOI is a perfectly acceptable type of citation: the hyperlinks in the HTML version of the MEC take you to the article (along with words of interest that I highlight, for example the Wikipedia entry for DOIs above), the search box at the top right of the ACS journal (and Symposium Series) webpages permit entry of a DOI (e.g., http://pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag), or you can direct your browser to http://dx.doi.org/“DOI”, where “DOI” should be replaced by that in question (for ES&T they are all 10.1021/esXXXXXXX) to electronically locate the manuscript. The print issue then adds volume, issue, and page numbers to the citation. It is our constant goal to have your research published as quickly and findably as possible due to our established web presence.
Darcy J. Gentleman Managing Editor
[email protected] September 15, 2010 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9 6905
