Freshwater Biodiversity

This volume draws experiences from different parts of the world on status, challenges, and efforts of reversing the current negative trends on wildlife habitats and species in the face of these changes. This book is useful for academicians, researchers, policy makers, conservation practitioners, students, and other interested readers.

This book is part of a two-volume set that offers an innovative approach towards developing methods and tools for assigning conservation categories of threatened taxa and their conservation strategies by way of different phases of eco-restoration in the context of freshwater river systems of tropical bio-geographic zones. The set provides a considerable volume of research on the biodiversity component of river ecosystems, seasonal dynamics of physical chemical parameters, geo-hydrological properties, types, sources and modes of action of different types of pollution, river restoration strategies and methodologies for the ongoing ecological changes of river ecosystems.

This book is the first volume of a compendium of the global distribution some 3500 aquatic macrophyte species occurring in inland freshwater and brackish waterbodies worldwide, highlighting aspects of their ecology including endemism, world rarity, ecozone/ macroregional occurrence, ploidy state, species age, uses, and endangered status. Although similar books exist for local regions (e.g., the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil) none provides complete and detailed information for macrophytes at global scale, so this book provides a novel resource on the distribution and ecology of macrophytes around the world.

Freshwater and Marine Ecology is an introduction to the field of aquatic ecology, integrating the conceptually and methodologically widely overlapping fields of limnology and biological oceanography. It is structured like most textbooks of general ecology, leading from more elemental entities (individuals having to cope with their environment) to increasingly overarching entities, from populations over communities and ecosystems to the biogeochemistry of the entire planet and, finally, an overview over the major human impacts on the aquatic components of the earth system. The book provides examples for all major theoretical concepts of general ecology while the usual ecology textbooks have a strong terrestrial bias and rely only on few aquatic examples. This book takes the contrasting approach, motivated by the fact the fact that life originated from aquatic systems and that surface waters cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface. The choice of studies used as examples in Freshwater and Marine Ecology provides a balanced mix of freshwater and marine studies, of field observations, experimental and modeling studies. The readers are confronted with very recent work leading to the forefront of contemporaneous research but also with classic studies which laid the foundations of theory development in the field. Freshwater and Marine Ecology is a comprehensive text ideally serving for undergraduate courses in biological oceanography, limnology, and ecology, but also for advanced students, teachers and scientists who had limited exposure to aquatic sciences and/or ecology during their studies.