Aquatic Biology

Lakes, ponds, rivers and streams are prominent features of the Arctic landscape and are also common in many parts of Antarctica. These waters encompass a remarkable variety of conditions for aquatic life, and are proving to be attractive model systems for exploring general ecological themes. Some of these ecosystems have direct global implications, and are also sentinels of global climate change. This book brings together many of the world's leading researchers in polar limnology to describe these diverse aquatic environments and their ecology. It introduces each major ecosystem type including extreme ice shelf and glacial meltwaters; subglacial lakes and rivers; perennially ice-capped lakes; meromictic and epishelf lake systems; tundra lakes and ponds; seasonal streams; and the large Arctic rivers with their associated floodplain lakes. Separate chapters review the geomorphology of polar lake basins, high latitude paleolimnology; biogeochemistry; physical limnology; microbial processes; microbial biodiversity and biogeography; benthic photosynthetic communities including microbial mats and mosses; phytoplankton and primary production; zooplankton and benthic invertebrates; the ecology of high Arctic fish; food web structure and dynamics; and new and emerging themes in high latitude limnology. The book incorporates the overriding theme of climate change impacts as well as direct impacts resulting from human activity.

Respiration represents the major area of ignorance in our understanding of the global carbon cycle. In spite of its obvious ecological and biogeochemical importance, most oceanographic and limnological textbooks deal with respiration only superficially and as an extension of production and other processes. The objective of this book is to fill this gap and to provide a comprehensive review of respiration in the major aquatic systems of the biosphere. The introductory chapters review the general importance of respiration in aquatic systems, and deal with respiration within four key biological components of aquatic systems: bacteria, algae, heterotrophic protists, and zooplankton. The central chapters of the book review respiration in major aquatic ecosystems: freshwater wetlands, lakes and rivers, estuaries, coastal and open oceans, and pelagic ecosystems, as well as respiration in suboxic environments. For each major ecosystem, the corresponding chapter provides a synthesis of methods used to assess respiration, outlines the existing information and data on respiration, discusses its regulation and links to biotic and abiotic factors, and provides regional and global estimates of the magnitude of respiration. This is followed by a chapter on the modelling of respiration for various components of the plankton. The final chapter provides a general synthesis of the information and data provided throughout the book, and places aquatic respiration within the context of the global carbon budget.