Freshwater ecology: changes, requirements, and future demands

Abstract

The past development and evolution of limnology as a discipline has demonstrated that experimentally controlled disturbances of parts of aquatic ecosystems are essential for quantitative evaluation of causal mechanisms governing their operation. Correlative analyses and modeling only establish hypotheses, not causality, and allow only therapeutic management applications. Rather than constantly searching for differences, commonality must be sought. Among the large diversity of species, communities, and biogeochemical processes controlling growth and reproduction, commonality emerges at the levels of regulation of metabolism. Five areas of current and future limnological research are discussed in relation to greatest needs and promise to yield insights into material and energy flows in freshwater ecosystems and their effective management: (1) coupled metabolic mutualism in the physiological ecology of microbes (viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protists) and their biogeochemical, especially organic, couplings with the environment; (2) biochemical regulation of collective metabolism, recycling, and bioavailability of nutrients and growth regulators; (3) application of genetic and molecular techniques to addressing biogeochemical, evolutionary, and pollution remediation problems; (4) recognition that the metabolism within lakes and streams is dependent upon and regulated to a major extent by organic matter of the drainage basin and especially by the land-water interface biogeochemistry; and (5) recognition that food-web alterations ("biomanipulation") are short-term, expensive therapeutic tools that may minimize effects of eutrophication but will not solve or control eutrophication.