Editorial

EDITORIAL

A Symposium on "Rock Outcrop Vegetation" took place on July 22^nd, 2004, during the 55^th Brazilian National Botanical Congress (July, 18-23, 2004) at Viçosa, Minas Gerais, southeast Brazil. Late Dr. Alexandre Francisco da Silva was the President of the Congress and had the inspired and timely idea of promoting this Symposium, and honoured one of us (Fábio Scarano) with an invitation to host it. The Symposium profitted from a fine selection of Brazilian and foreign authorities on the topic and from over five hours of debate along a whole day, which fostered fruitful ideas.

One of us (Fábio de Barros) was by then Chief-Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Botany, and was approached by the Symposium organizer with a tempting proposal to publish the contents of talks and other studies presented at the Congress. In addition to the obvious scientific relevance, this act would symbolize the partnership and co-operation between the two Botanical societies Sociedade Botânica de São Paulo and Sociedade Botânica do Brasil. This project developed slower than we hoped for, but we are sure that the final result was well worth it.

Thus, the Symposium was the starting point for this issue. And the partnership between the two "Fábios" arrives, finally, to completion, with the publication of this special issue at the Brazilian Journal of Botany – the first of its kind published by this journal. Since this is a special issue, it bears a few peculiarities as compared to regular issues of the journal: (a) editors specifically related to the subjected; (b) there is a second front page, indicating this is a special issue; (c) the sequence of papers does not follow date of acceptance but, instead, the themes covered, starting off from the papers that are more general in scope; (d) there is a combination of review papers and original papers along the issue.

We wish to express our deepest thanks to Dr. Solange C. Mazzoni-Viveiros, Chief-Editor, who supported us and kept our moral high throughout the entire project; all assistant editors and technical editors of the journal for their high-quality work; to the authors who produced such an excellent material, and the referees who carefully revised each of the manuscripts.

Our love and special thanks are for Dr. Alexandre Francisco da Silva (in memoriam), our dear friend Alex, who idealized and stimulated the realization of the Symposium. Unfortunately, he died prematurely on September 22^nd, 2006, without seeing the publication of this fascicle. It is only natural that we dedicate this issue to him,

Fábio de Barros

Fábio R. Scarano

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  28 Feb 2008
• Date of issue
  Dec 2007