Submerged macrophytes have been the object of intensive research, and a large body of literature exists on their growth, reproduction, and physiology. Several studies have focused on the interactions between submerged macrophytes and other autotrophic components and the impact of the plants on the dynamics of nutrients, dissolved organic and inorganic carbon, oxygen, and pH. Comparatively few studies have dealt with the ability of submerged macrophytes to modulate the structure and dynamics of pelagic and benthic food webs. Recently, however, the amount of research into the structuring role...

While ecology is one of the scientific disiplines that most clearly belongs to ''basic research," it also strives to serve as a predictive tool for management. Outstanding examples of predictive ecology are Vollenweider's models on the relationship between phosphorus load and water renewal time of lakes, and the resulting algal biomass. The needed few and easily accessible input parameters to very simple models provided a direct link from basic ecology to management, and today these models are key tools for managers worldwide to control lake eutrophication and algal blooms. The baseline of...

The storage of carbon in forest ecosystems has received special attention in the Kyoto protocol of the Climate Convention, which attempts to equilibrate fossil fuel emissions with biological sinks. This volume quantifies carbon storage in managed forest ecosystems not only in biomass, but also in all soil compartments. It investigates the interaction between the carbon and nitrogen cycles by working along a north-south transect through Europe which starts in northern Sweden, passes through a N-deposition maximum in central Europe and ends in Italy. Surprisingly, C storage in soils increases...

All those who think that bivalves are boring are in the best company. Karl von Frisch is reported to have turned the pages more quickly in texts where bivalves were treated because, according to him, they literally lack any behaviour. The fact that they can filtrate huge amounts of water, burrow into the sedi- ment, actively swim, drill holes into rocks and boats or detect shadows with the aid of pretty blue eyes located on the rim of their mantle obviously left v. Frisch unimpressed. Why, then, a book on the large freshwater mussels (Naiads or Unionoida), which on first sight are much less...

Due to the rapidly increasing need for methods of data compression, quantization has become a flourishing field in signal and image processing and information theory. The same techniques are also used in statistics (cluster analysis), pattern recognition, and operations research (optimal location of service centers). The book gives the first mathematically rigorous account of the fundamental theory underlying these applications. The emphasis is on the asymptotics of quantization errors for absolutely continuous and special classes of singular probabilities (surface measures, self-similar...

The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, spawned a multitude of pro- grammes aimed at assessing, managing and conserving the earth's biological diversity. One important issue addressed at the conference was the mountain environment. A specific feature of high mountains is the so-called alpine zone, i. e. the treeless regions at the uppermost reaches. Though covering only a very small proportion of the land surface, the alpine zone contains a rela- tively large number of plants, animals, fungi and microbes which are specifi-...