Ecology Journals LaTeX Class

LaTeX is a document markup language used to create manuscripts that have nice typesetting. Professional looking documents can be created from simple text files. It is particularly useful for creating manuscripts that have math equations in them. Writing documents in LaTeX should allow authors to focus on content of the manuscript rather than the formatting. All La-tex documents are associated with a class file which sets the formatting for the document. Users simply associate a document with a class and the text is formatted appropriately. Unfortunately, many academic journals have very specific formatting requirements not built into LaTeX. The journals of the Ecological Society of America do not have LaTeX class files appropriate for their major journals: Ecology, Ecological Applications and Ecological Monographs (even though they will accept documents in LaTeX format). One user-created LaTeX class file for ecology is available here. However, this class formats a LaTeX file into a proof-style document, not a submission-style document. I have recently been writing a submission for Ecological Applications that is in LaTeX. I had to write my own class file for formatting this document according to the ESA guidelines (http://esapubs.org/esapubs/preparation.htm). I am sure that others have run into the same problem. So, I am making my class file publicly available. Please consider this class to be in alpha. I have not, yet, written support for multiple author addresses simply because I didn't need it for the current manuscript. Feel free to improve the class. Just let me know about it, so I can use it as well. To use this class in a LaTeX document, you can either install the class file into your LaTeX distribution or simply place the file in the same folder as your LaTeX document. Bibliography formatting using BibTex requires the natbib package be installed and the ecology.bst bibliography format file. I have packaged the ecology.cls class along with an example latex file, the proof pdf, an example figure, and an example bibligraphy into a tarball available below. Download: ecologyLatexClass.tar.gz