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This book addresses many of our present-day water quality problems from an international perspective, covering critical issues such as acidification, eutrophication, land-use changes, pollution by metals and other contaminants, climatic change, and biodiversity losses.

It demonstrates how paleolimnological approaches can be used to interpret the physical, chemical, and biological information stored in lake and river sediments, and how this information is integral to identifying key environmental stressors and setting targets for mitigation purposes.

This new edition includes over 250 additional references and a new chapter on recent climatic change and its effects on water quality and quantity. This comprehensive, up-to-date volume provides essential insights into a multi-disciplinary science aimed at tackling some of the most urgent environmental problems of modern times.

Order Online from Blackwell

The SHALLOW LAKES CONGRESS 2008 will be held in Punta del Este, Uruguay. If we receive enough abstracts, there will be a special session on paleolimnology.

For abstract submission as well as general info on congress location, please visit the website:
http://www.shallowlakes2008.org

The deadline for abstract submission and registration is 31st March 2008.

I would like to encourage those working on paleolimnology of shallow lakes to come and show your work, and enjoy the congress!

We look forward to welcoming you in Uruguay.

On behalf of the Organising Committee.

Felipe Garcia-Rodriguez

The meeting will take place in June, 2009 in Guadalajara, Mexico (dates still to be confirmed but 23-26th have been suggested).

Guadalajara is the state capital of Jalisco and Mexico’s second largest city with a population of 5.1 million. The symposium will take place at a city-centre venue to be arranged.

There will be three symposium field-trips. The first will take in the archaeological site of Ixtlan del Rio in Nayarit, the Santa Maria del Oro crater lake and the Ceboruco volcano. During the meeting there will be an excursion to the archaeological site of Guachimontones. Finally, a post-meeting trip will take the Tequila Express!

More details in 2008!

Introduction

The purpose of the China-Japan-Korea (CJK) Workshop is to exchange modern and historical environmental information in East Asia region for clarifying environmental processes and changes since the last interglacial in East Asia. The CJK International Workshop was initially held in Daejeon, Korea (2004), and was subsequently in Kanazawa, Japan (2005) and Seoul, Korea (2006). Since the 4th workshop, it will be held in China, Japan and Korea by turns, and the workshop theme will be decided by the host, which was a key agreement of the 3rd workshop in Korea. The theme of 4th workshop will be “Modern Lake-Catchment Processes and Human Activity in East Asia”.

As a part of continental hydrosphere, lake is closely related with the atmosphere, biosphere and lithosphere, being a conjunction of the above spheres. The lacustrine sediment, with the advantages of continuous record, high resolution, abundant environmental information and widely geographical distribution, recorded faithfully the global, regional and local signals of environmental evolution, and is the archive of regional difference of water and heat balances. Additionally, lacustrine sediments preserved abundant information of interaction between human activities and natural processes, because lake catchment is used to be concentrated places of human beings for its abundant fresh water resources, plenty products and feasible climate conditions. Thus lake sediment, as an informative carrier, plays an important role in past global change research and shows more and more advantages and potentiality in management and restoration of lake-catchment environment.

There is a long history of civilization in East Asia, where human activity has undergone the process from acclimating to altering the nature, correspondingly the lake-catchment ecological processes has changed from nature-dominated to human-dominated. Studies on paleo-environmental change clarify the process of the ecological response to human activity and natural variation and their interactions, and provide the basis to project environmental scenario in future. Studies of the modern lake-catchment process provide the useful approaches on reasonable interpretation of sediments proxies, quantitative reconstruction of paleo-environmental change and effective distinguishing the human impact on environment and ecologic system.

Main topics

1. Present lake-catchment processes: Observational results and Interpretation;
2. Present process and environmental proxy transformation function;
3. Lacustrine sediment choronology;
4. High resolution records of environmental changes;
5. Ecological response to human activity and natural variation and their interactions;
6. Regional comparison of historical environmental change;
7. Modeling for mechanism of environmental change and forecasting environment change tendency;
8. General discussion and some topics for the future cooperation.

Hosted by
Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGLAS)

Organized by
Key Laboratory of Lake Sedimentation and Environment, Nanjing
Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGLAS)
Institute of Nature and Environmental Technology, Kanazawa University
Japan Science Council, National Committee for IAG (under negotiation)
Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM)

Sponsored by
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)
Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGLAS)
Japanese Geomorphological Union, Japan
Kanazawa University, Japan
The Korean Quaternary Association, Korea

Scientific Committee
Chairs: Ji Shen (Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
K. Kashiwaya (Kanazawa University, Japan)
Dong-Yoon Yang (Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources, Korea)
Members: Sumin Wang (China), Jun Chen (China), Fahu Chen (China), Weijian
Zhou (China), Jian Wang (China), Jule Xiao (China), Liping Zhu
(China), Xiangdong Yang (China), T. Okimura (Japan), H. Takahara
(Japan), K. Saito (Japan), Ju-Yong Kim (Korea)

Organizing Committee
Chair: Yanhong Wu (Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
Members: Xiangdong Yang, Enlou Zhang, Enfeng Liu, N. Hasebe, T. Aoki, N. Endo, K. Fukushi, Jeong Chan Kim, Wook-Hyun Nahm, Sangheon Yi, Seong-Joong Kim, Kyung Sik Woo, Youngsin Chun

Tentative schedule
17 September, Registration;
18 September, Opening ceremony and invited oral presentations (morning), Session oral presentations, posters (afternoon);
19 September, Session oral presentations, posters, further discussion;
20 September, Excursion;
21 September, Departure.

General information
The workshop will include oral, poster sessions and field excursion. The official language for all presentations is English. Participants are invited to give oral and/or poster presentations. Please submit abstract of WORD or PDF document by email. Accepted abstracts will be published in the workshop program volume, which will be distributed to all the participants. The A0 size of a poster is welcomed. All kinds of presentation equipment will be provided including PC computer, LCD projector, slide- projector and overhead project.

Deadlines
Registration and abstract: 31 July

Fees
Registration Fee: 250USD, 600CNY(for Chinese)
Excursion Fee: 50USD
Accomodation: Hotel reservation for participants will be done by the host according to the responses. Standard single room or double room may cost ca. 300 CNY per day.

Contact
Yanhong Wu, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, China, Tel: 0086-25-8688 2145, Fax: 0086-25-57713063,
yhwu@niglas.ac.cn

Mark Brenner is a limnologist and paleolimnologist with special interests in tropical and subtropical lakes and watersheds. He received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Grinnell College (1973) and his MS (1978) and PhD (1983) degrees in Zoology at the University of Florida (UF), where he studied with Edward S. Deevey. Between 1983 and 2000, Mark was affiliated with UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History, the Department of Soil and Water Science, and the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, where he conducted grant- and contract-supported research. In 2000, he entered a tenure-track position in UF’s Department of Geological Sciences, where he is now Associate Professor. He also serves as Director of UF’s interdisciplinary “Land Use and Environmental Change Institute” (LUECI). Mark teaches courses in Paleolimnology, Limnology, and Tropical Field Ecology, the latter a summer class taught in Yucatan, Mexico. [Mark’s homepage at UF]

Mark’s paleolimnological research has addressed the broad topic of interactions among climate, environment, and humans. Specifically, he has strong interests in the areas of: 1) recent human-mediated changes in Florida lakes, 2) the historical ecology of the lowland Maya region, 3) Pleistocene/Holocene paleoclimate of the circum-Caribbean, 4) environmental history of the Bolivian Altiplano, 5) paleoecology of Yunnan Province, China, 5) the history of El Niño events, 6) ²¹⁰Pb dating, and 7) biological accumulation of ²²⁶Ra. He has done fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, Haiti, Dominican Republic, China, Cambodia, and Florida. A list of publications is available at http://web.geology.ufl.edu/faculty/brenner_cv.html.

Mark has been closely associated with the Journal of Paleolimnology since its inception in the 1980s as an author of 15 contributions to this journal, and I suspect has done more reviews for us than any other paleolimnologist! Mark became a member of the Journal of Paleolimnology Board of Advisors in 1992 and was appointed an Associate Editor in 1996. Amongst his other claims to fame, he is also a veteran of the 1969 Woodstock Festival!

John Smol will be working closely with Mark (as co-Editor) over the next few months. Because all Journal of Paleolimnology submissions are now web-based, the submission and editing process does not change from the author’s or reviewer’s perspective. It is my intention to retire as Editor, effective December 31st 2007, after which time Mark will become Editor-in-Chief.

At this time I would again like to thank Mark for accepting this position – I have no doubt whatsoever that he is an outstanding choice as Editor. I would also like to thank the editorial board for their continued support and input during this process, as well as our colleagues at Springer. Once again, I would like to acknowledge Bill Last’s outstanding contributions as co-editor of the journal for 14 years. And, of course, thanks for all the support provided by our authors and referees, who continue to be the backbone of our journal.

John P. Smol
Editor

The UK Environment Agency has funded the development of three interactive CD-ROMs to help their staff and others to identify freshwater algae (blue-green algae, green algae and diatoms).

This, the latest CD, is an interactive multi access key/tool for the identification of diatoms of Britain and Ireland.

Diatoms are a group of algae, used for monitoring water quality and ecological status of rivers and lakes. Diatoms are one of the biological monitoring elements used in the Environment Agency (and SEPA, EHS) from 2006, as required by the Water Framework Directive for ecological monitoring and classification purposes.

This key is integral to implementing the diatom methods, used in diatom identification training programmes leading to accredited analysts, for robust reporting of diatom data.

The CD-ROMs are based on the Lucid software, developed by the University of Queensland in Australia. The key itself is multi-access, rather than dichotomous. An important benefit of this approach is that the set of attributes can be much broader than is the case for a traditional key.

For diatoms, it is possible to include information on the characteristics of “live” diatoms alongside attributes seen only in “cleaned” material, allowing the key to work in a wider range of situations than was the case in previous keys.

The key covers those diatom taxa (>300) most likely to be encountered by Environment Agency staff and others involved in routine monitoring. It also incorporates the functionality to expand the database to cover some of the other ~2,500 species of freshwater diatoms recorded from Britain and Ireland, and to take account of any future changes in diatom taxonomy.

A standalone CD-ROM version of the diatom key is now published by the UK Environment Agency and is available to purchase online for £65.

Bill’s outstanding editing skills, helped by his good humor, contagious enthusiasm and remarkable work ethic have helped hundreds of paleolimnologists bring their contributions to publication. Bill joined John Smol as the co-editor of JOPL in 1993. The success of JOPL since then has been due to that very productive partnership.

We thank Bill for his major contribution to our science and wish him well for the future.