Plenary lecture Global limnology: up-scaling aquatic services and processes to planet Earth

摘要

It is onerous to try to define the field of global limnology and encourage the world's aquatic scientists to become more engaged in a field that they already know well. I have been searching for regular patterns in rates and processes in aquatic ecosystems for some decades but was only recently encouraged to up-scale these processes to a global level. We limnologists tend to look at each of our ecosystems as a unique entity, a tradition underlain by our backgrounds as naturalists. It is therefore a special tribute to limnologists' scientific objectivity that we have already assembled one of the largest bodies of predictive theories in the environmental sciences (PETERS 1986, PACE 2001). It is this foundation of seeking patterns and performing multi-ecosystem compara-tive analyses that will allow limnologists to make rapid pro-gress in our global understanding. The purposes of this paper are to define the field of global limnology, convince limnolo-gists that it is important to pursue, provide a brief description of how to accomplish this, give some examples of global lim-nological analyses, and suggest areas in which global limnol-ogists need to make rapid and concerted progress.