CUR academic joins editorial board of new international journal

Senior Research Fellow at the RMIT Centre for Urban Research Dr Cecily Maller has been selected as a lead editor for the new international journal People and Nature.

People and Nature is an open access journal dedicated to publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed work from research areas exploring relationships between humans and nature.

It is a joint venture between the British Ecological Society (BES and its publisher John Wiley & Sons.

Recognising the importance of human aspects in all areas of ecology, People and Nature fosters innovation and experimentation.

The journal will be led by Kevin J Gaston, Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation at the University of Exeter who will work closely with Maller and other lead editors including Rosie Hails, Kai Chan, and Rob Fish, and an expert board of associate editors drawn from a wide array of fields that intersect with ecology, including economics, law, geography and sociology.

“Now more than ever we need to look beyond disciplinary boundaries to more transformative, transdisciplinary ways of thinking to understand human-nature relationships,” Maller said.

As co-leader of the Beyond Behaviour Change Research Programme, Maller studies human-environment interactions, sustainability and health in the context of everyday life in urban environments.

She is Deputy Theme Leader for Liveability in the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub with colleagues from RMIT and the universities of Melbourne, Wollongong and Western Australia. Her recent projects include a five-year project with VicHealth and industry partners exploring how best-practice planning affects residents’ health and wellbeing in a master-planned estate in Melbourne.

Maller has published widely on the health benefits of contact with nature, including as lead author on the Healthy Parks, Healthy People report (Parks Victoria 2002, 2008) and several highly cited journal articles.

Recently, she co-edited a book on interventions to improve sustainability titled Social Practices, Interventions and Sustainability: Beyond Behaviour Change (Routledge, 2014).


People and Nature will open for submissions in June.

Available exclusively online, People and Nature will be published in partnership with John Wiley & Sons, alongside five established journals from the BES, namely: Journal of EcologyJournal of Applied Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Functional Ecology, and Journal of Animal Ecology.