What role should ecology play in the management and conservation of inland water resources?

摘要

It is natural for each of us to perceive problems from the point of view of our own disciplines and specialities, and we usually reckon that there is not enough attention being paid to our area. Yet it is salutary to detach ourselves and see the problem from an overall perspective. I am, or at least have been for the last 15 years of my professional life, a benthic ecologist. I am primarily an ecologist, and because I work in streams and rivers where the organisms tend to be attached or on the bottom, I am an ecologist of the benthos. However, I incorporate other aspects of stream ecosystem functioning into my studies as the need arises, and I try to project the results of my work into questions of management and conservation of fluvial systems, i think benthic ecology has many important things to say about river conservation and management, but I need to temper my chauvinism to view the question objectively. In this editorial, i will use as an example the newly formed Brazilian 'Agencia Nacional das Aguas' (National Water Agency, ANA). 1 do not have the space or the expertise to analyse ANA comprehensively here, but I will use the example to provoke the question of my title and to reflect how benthology and ecology in general interact with larger-scale water management. As we will see, the question of 'conservation', with a big or little 'c', inevitably confronts us.