To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) has made the most influential papers from 100 years of its journals available open-access through the end of 2015.

Several current researchers made the list, contributing with studies on everything from response diversity and ecosystem services to resilience and traditional ecological knowledge. There is one list for each ESA journal: Ecological Applications, Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Frontiers and Ecosphere.

Response diversity and traditional knowledge
A whole group of Centre researchers are featured on one of the lists, as authors of a paper in the journal Frontiers in 2003. The paper Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience was co-authored by Thomas Elmqvist, Carl Folke, Magnus Nyström, Garry Peterson, Brian Walker and Jon Norberg, together with Jan Bengtsson from Uppsala University. It has been cited in almost 500 articles and introduced the concept "response diversity". This explains diverse responses to environmental change and disturbances among species contributing to the same ecosystem function.

Another influential article with Centre involvement is the year 2000 Ecological Application publication Rediscovery of traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management. This was co-authored by Johan Colding and Carl Folke together with Fikret Berkes from the University of Manitoba, Canada. It was a seminal paper assessing the role of traditional ecological knowledge in monitoring, responding to, and managing ecosystem processes and functions.

In addition to these two papers a number of other Centre associated researchers are also featured on the ESA lists. For example, board members Stephen Carpenter, Gretchen Daily and Simon Levin, as well as Stephen Polasky of the Beijer Institute, made the list two times or more.

Impact and influence
The list of notable papers from ESA is based on the number of times each paper has been cited and the number of online views it has received. These are both measures that indirectly reflect impact and influence in the field of ecological science.

However, ESA invites comments and recognises that citations and downloads are not perfect measures of quality.

"The lists are a starting point for reflection and discussion. We’d like to invite your observations on the value of these papers, whether it’s an observation on the impact of the article, or how things have evolved in that field, to a personal reflection, or even an explanation on why a particular article has been over-rated/over-cited," they write on their website.