About the Journal

Journal Information

Journal of Sustainable Watershed Science and Management is a multi-disciplinary Scientific Journal which recognizes watershed as the management unit within which natural resources and environmental management issues are addressed in integrated approaches involving physical, biological, socio-economical, legal and policy prospective as they relate to sustainability. It also recognizes sustainability as a dynamic concept which accommodates all forms of change (e.g., climate, population, land use).

Journal of Sustainable Watershed Science and Management charges $314.99 per manuscript published. There is no charge for submitting a manuscript to any Atlas Publishing, LLC journal.

Journal of Sustainable Watershed Science and Management is indexed in the following databases:

"All articles in Atlas journals are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited". The copyright is held by the authors.

Aims and Scope

Journal of Sustainable Watershed Science and Management is a multi-disciplinary Scientific Journal which recognizes watershed as the management unit within which natural resources and environmental management issues are addressed in integrated approaches involving physical, biological, socio-economical, legal and policy prospective as they relate to sustainability. It also recognizes sustainability as a dynamic concept which accommodates all forms of change (e.g., climate, population, land use).

Scientists are invited to publish their fundamental, strategic and applied research in any of the areas stated below, or other topical areas of relevance:

  • Establishment and evaluation of watershed science and management programs and policies
  • Anthropogenic and human manipulation of landscapes and the water cycle
  • Watershed sustainability from a holistic/comprehensive scope including physical, biological, socioeconomic and policy issues
  • Determinants, indicators and criteria of watershed sustainability
  • Contrasts in multiple land-use settings, e.g. urban vs. rural, forest, range lands, cropland
  • Degradation threats and mechanisms (include routine vs. catastrophic storms)
  • Data requirements, scaling and aggregation (point vs. spatially distributed measurements, plot scale experiment vs. watershed)
  • Modeling in the face of global land use and climate change
  • Human dimensions and cultural influences
  • Managing watersheds in public vs. private lands
  • Quantifying watershed productivity (water, carbon, vegetation, wildlife, recreation, ecotourism and non-market values)
  • Contrasting different watershed management approaches: indigenous vs. contemporary, balancing biological and engineering approaches, limits to biological measures
  • Adoption of BMPs for adoption under diverse agro-ecological zones
  • Special considerations for desertification-vulnerable regions (arid and semi-arid)
  • Interlinks between inland and coastal management, and water quality
  • Social/economic conflicts and resolutions (e.g. upland-lowland issues)
  • Analyses and standards for downstream impacts (TMDL, etc,…)
  • Waste disposal & management for WS protection

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Atlas Publishing, LLC follows high standards of ethics in all its publishing materials: journal articles and books. The publisher, editors, and authors, are responsible to implement and enforce these high standards of ethics (http://www.publicationethics.org).

Publication Decision

The ultimate responsibility to publish an article or reject it lies on the shoulder of the journal editor. After receiving review reports from the peer-reviewers, the editor takes a decision to publish or reject the article. He/she may also consult with other editors and/or reviewers to take this decision.

Confidentiality

Information contained in the submitted manuscript must not be disclosed by the editor or the editorial staff to any parties other than the reviewers, other editorial advisors, and the publisher.

Fair Play

All Atlas Publishing, LLC’s editors must evaluate manuscripts based on the merit of their contribution to the field of study and intellectual content with no consideration of the authors’ race, religion, gender, political views, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or citizenship.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

The editors are not allowed to use materials in a submitted manuscript in their research without a written consent from the authors.

1. Reviewers’ Duties

Peer reviews review manuscripts and submit their review reports to the editor. These reviewers’ reports assist the authors to improve their manuscripts and the editor to take an editorial decision about the manuscript. If a reviewer is unable to review a manuscript for any reason, he/she should refrain from reviewing the manuscript and inform the editor.

a. Confidentiality

All manuscripts received by the editor must be treated as confidential documents and not shown or discussed with others unless the editor authorizes it.

b. Standards of Objectivity

Reviewers should be objective in their reviews, leave apart any personal criticism of the author or his/her research group, and support their views with clearly stated arguments.

c. Acknowledgement of Sources

Reviewers should strive to identify any uncited published works by the authors and report it to the editor. Reviewers should also report any similarities between the manuscript under review and any other published work they might know of.

d. Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

Reviewers should keep confidential all information and ideas obtained from the manuscript they are reviewing and must not use them for their personal advantage. They also should not review a manuscript with any apparent conflict of interest.

2. Authors Duties

a. Reporting Standards

Authors are responsible to submit original research findings that are accurate with an objective discussion of their significance to the field or discipline of study. It is unethical and unacceptable to knowingly report fraudulent and inaccurate statements in any submitted manuscript to any journal published by Atlas Publishing, LLC.

b. Data Access and Retention

Atlas Publishing, LLC or the journal’s editor may ask the authors to provide the raw data of their manuscript for review purposes and to be accessible as practiced by several prominent publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS; www.plos.org) and the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (http://www.stm-assoc.org). They also should keep this data for at least 5 years after publication.

c. Originality and Plagiarism

By submitting the article, all the authors attest firmly that:

  1. They read the manuscript
  2. Agreed on its final form
  3. It is their original work
  4. Has not been published or submitted to another journal
  5. The manuscript is free of any plagiarism
  6. The manuscript does not contain materials copyrighted by another person or entity
  7. The manuscript does not infringe others copyright or other rights

All articles are checked for plagiarism before publication.

d. Acknowledgement of Sources

Authors must cite all publications used to determine the nature of their submitted manuscript.

e. Authorship of the Paper

Authors are those who made a significant contribution to the submitted study during its design, conception, execution, and interpretation and it is the responsibility of the corresponding author to insure that all authors contributed to the study.

f. Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

All financial and substantive conflict of interest should be disclosed by all authors of the manuscript. Authors should also disclose all sources of financial support for the submitted manuscript.

g. Fundamental Errors in Published Works

If errors or inaccuracies are discovered in a manuscript by an author, he/she is responsible to report them to the publisher or the editor and be engaged in the process of retracting or correcting the manuscript.