Steeve Côté named Wildlife Monographs editor-in-chief

New Wildlife Monographs’s editor-in-chief Steeve Côté brings a new vision to the long-running journal.

An ecology professor at Université Laval in Quebec, Côté has taken over the position previously held by Merav Ben-David, a professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of Wyoming.

“We did an international search and had 16 very strong candidates to consider,” said Evelyn Merrill, chair of TWS’ Publications Committee. “We were all really impressed with a number of candidates, but Steeve really has an excellent publication record. He has evolved with publication standards over time. He has published on a broad range of wildlife species and topics, including things like conservation genetics, climate change, large mammals, parasites. He has a broad topic background for handling different topics that may be submitted. He also has had a longstanding role as an associate editor with the Journal of Wildlife Management.”

Wildlife Monographs is a unique journal. Published since 1958, it is devoted to single-topic, peer-reviewed studies on specific problems and issues in wildlife science, management and conservation.

“What I like is that it’s a venue to read complete stories,” said Côté, who has served as an associate editor at JWM since 2009. He has also served as associate editor at Wildlife Biology, guest editor at Northeastern Naturalist and special issues editor for Ecoscience.

In most journals, studies get broken up into a variety of publications, Côté said. Wildlife Monographs allows researchers to dig deeper into their subjects. But the journal could be made more current, he said, with a greater breadth of international topics and some shorter studies that are too long for other journals but fall short of Wildlife Monographs’ page count.

Côté would also like to solicit manuscripts on pressing topics, like avian flu or SARS-CoV-2 in deer—topics that have large geographic ranges but not the long time periods of study involved in most monographs.

“I think it’s a good challenge to try to improve a journal that’s been around for many, many years,” Côté said. “I think there are ways to make it a little bit more up to 2022.”

Those ideas impressed the search committee, Merrill said. Côté brings to the position an extensive publishing record on a diverse range of species, from caribou (Rangifer tarandus) in Canada to sable antelope (Hippotragus niger) in Zimbabwe

“There are so many topics these days that are just continuing to explode and are really important issues,” she said. “I think we’re open to a broader range of topics and also maybe the format that those topics are presented in.”

Côté “had the right mix of the breadth of experience, the topics, the international flavor,” Merrill said. “He’s worked with Indigenous peoples and really has some creative ideas on how to continue to promote TWS’ mission in terms of providing science-based information.”