Limnology

Summary

Limnology (lɪmˈnɒlədʒi ; ) is the study of inland aquatic ecosystems. The study of limnology includes aspects of the biological, chemical, physical, and geological characteristics of fresh and saline, natural and man-made bodies of water. This includes the study of lakes, reservoirs, ponds, rivers, springs, streams, wetlands, and groundwater. Water systems are often categorized as either running (lotic) or standing (lentic). Limnology includes the study of the drainage basin, movement of water through the basin and biogeochemical changes that occur en route. A more recent sub-discipline of limnology, termed landscape limnology, studies, manages, and seeks to conserve these ecosystems using a landscape perspective, by explicitly examining connections between an aquatic ecosystem and its drainage basin. Recently, the need to understand global inland waters as part of the Earth system created a sub-discipline called global limnology. This approach considers processes in inland waters

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnology

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (7)

Related publications

Related people (1)

Related people

Related units (2)

Related units

Related concepts (30)

Related concepts

Related courses (2)

Focus is on lakes, rivers and reservoirs as aquatic systems. Specific is the quantitative analyse (incl. exercises) of physical, biogeochemical and sedimentological processes / interactions. The goal is to understand the relevant processes (focus on water quality) from an engineering perspective.

Indoor climate is of great significance to our well-being. This course offers a fundamental knowledge of the parameters that influence indoor climate (air quality and thermal environment). It also gives an overview of building controls methods that contribute to more comfortable and safe spaces.

Related courses

Related lectures (1)

Related lectures

Investigation of heavy metals distribution in suspended matter and macrophytes of the Selenga river delta using airborne hyperspectral remote sensing

Yosef Akhtman, Dragos Constantin, Bertrand Merminod, Martin Rehak, Galina Shinkareva, Mikhail Tarasov, Natacha Tofield-Pasche

The Leman-Baikal project is an international Swiss-Russian research initiative in the fields of physical limnology, geochemistry and hydrology of aquatic geosystems. The main methodological principle of the project is constituted by simultaneous collection of airborne wide-area Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) and ground point-based data. In this study we used supervised classification of hyperspectral images to interpret three types of aquatic species: small yellow pond lily, reed and pondweeds with watermilfoil. For turbidity mapping we used mosaic hyperspectral image (band 534 nm) to derive Total Suspended Matter (TSM). A good level of correlation between reflectance values and TSM concentrations were observed.

2015

Leman-Baikal: Remote sensing of lakes using an ultralight plane

Yosef Akhtman, Damien Bouffard, Dragos Constantin, Ulrich Lemmin, Bertrand Merminod, Vincent Maurice Nouchi, Martin Rehak, Galina Shinkareva

The Leman-Baikal project constitutes an international Swiss-Russian collaborative research initiative in the field of physical limnology. The three-year framework involves the development and deployment of a novel multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing platform optimised for the sensing of land and water surfaces from an ultralight aircraft. In this paper we discuss the developed remote sensing methodology and the initial obtained results.

2014

Changing nutrient cycling in Lake Baikal, the world's oldest lake

Sebastiano Piccolroaz

Lake Baikal, lying in a rift zone in southeastern Siberia, is the world's oldest, deepest, and most voluminous lake that began to form over 30 million years ago. Cited as the "most outstanding example of a freshwater ecosystem" and designated a World Heritage Site in 1996 due to its high level of endemicity, the lake and its ecosystem have become increasingly threatened by both climate change and anthropogenic disturbance. Here, we present a record of nutrient cycling in the lake, derived from the silicon isotope composition of diatoms, which dominate aquatic primary productivity. Using historical records from the region, we assess the extent to which natural and anthropogenic factors have altered biogeochemical cycling in the lake over the last 2,000 y. We show that rates of nutrient supply from deep waters to the photic zone have dramatically increased since the mid-19th century in response to changing wind dynamics, reduced ice cover, and their associated impact on limnological processes in the lake. With stressors linked to untreated sewage and catchment development also now impacting the near-shore region of Lake Baikal, the resilience of the lake's highly endemic ecosystem to ongoing and future disturbance is increasingly uncertain.

NATL ACAD SCIENCES2020