Nandini Sarma
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico, nandini@unam.mx

Date: Friday, 5 August 2022
Time: Full Day
Format: Online

During this workshop we will highlight important aspects of limnology and aquatic ecology which can serve the students and the community; especially with respect to live food culture for fish farming, analyses of water quality and ecotoxicology. Live food farming is a fundamental part of fish culture. Planktonic communities in lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands, on which fish primarily depend, are dominated by algae and cyanobacteria (phytoplankton), and by rotifers, cladocerans, and copepods (zooplankton). These are significant in the transfer of energy from lower trophic levels (such as bacteria, detritus and phytoplankton) to higher levels. Rotifers and cladocerans, being smaller and less elusive than copepods, are important constituents of the diet of fish, particularly during the larval stages. In ecotoxicological studies rotifers and cladocerans are used extensively as bioassay organisms for the derivation of mean lethal concentrations of a wide variety of toxicants. These organisms are particularly useful as they are sensitive indicators, have a short lifespan, are easy to maintain under laboratory conditions, and are parthenogenetic during most of their life cycle, thereby exhibiting low intraspecific variability and allowing higher accuracy of the results. During the course we will present lectures on the following topics 1.Identification of zooplankton species with emphasis on species with application as live food or bioassay organisms. 2. Large scale plankton culture techniques. 3.Design of simple predation experiments to improve survival of larval fish. 4. Ecotoxicology with emphasis on xenobiotics and cyanotoxins. 5. Analysis of water quality using zooplankton indicators and water quality indices.

Mary R. Gradoville
University of California, United States, mgradovi@ucsc.edu

Bridget R. Deemer, United States Geological Survey, United States, bdeemer@usgs.gov, Renee van Dorst, Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany, renee.van.Dorst@igb-berlin.de

Date: Sunday, 7 August 2022
Time: Morning
Format: Online or Hybrid

Scholarly peer review is an essential part of the scientific process, yet many early career researchers (ECRs) enter the role of referee without prior training. At this interactive workshop, we will present and discuss strategies for conducting effective, time-efficient review. A previous workshop hosted by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), a complementary limnological society, showed that many ECRs have a strong interest in reviewing but are unsure of their qualifications to review and desire further training. Here, we provide peer review tips and tricks from editors of both ASLO and SIL, fostering interactions among scientists of diverse career stages and between limnological societies. Specifically, we will discuss the results of a survey of ASLO editors regarding their process for choosing reviewers, what qualifies one to review, what makes a review helpful, and strategies for conducting a review. We will convene a panel of experienced peer reviewers to foster discussion on these topics, with a special focus on handling peer review of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) manuscripts. Challenges regarding ESL submissions have emerged as a key concern in previous workshops and are especially relevant for international society journals like SIL and ASLO. The most valuable output from this workshop will be instilling confidence in ECRs regarding their reviewing skills. Additionally, we hope to disseminate key takeaways from this discussion in an accessible format, such as a SIL news piece, and to brainstorm ways to connect associate editors with the emerging ECR pool.

Maria Magdalena Üblacker
IGB-Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany, maria.ueblacker@igb-berlin.de

Afroditi Grigoropoulou, IGB-Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany, afroditi.grigoropoulou@igb-berlin.de, Sami Domisch, IGB-Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany, sami.domisch@igb-berlin.de, Jaime Ricardo García Márquez, IGB-Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany, jaime.marquez@igb-berlin.de

Date: Friday 5 August 2022
Time: Morning
Format: Online

Freshwater habitats are strongly characterized by the connectivity among water bodies, yet this unique feature is often neglected in freshwater biodiversity analyses. In this interactive workshop we will focus on species geographic data and how this can be linked to a high-resolution hydrographic network to append spatially explicit attributes regarding connectivity, network topology, environmental data, and other infrastructures (e.g. dams, barriers). We will provide a full workflow starting with raw GPS data and use a suite of open-source tools including GRASS-GIS, GDAL, and R to (i) attach occurrence points to the closest stream reach, (ii) determine the upstream catchment area where the occurrence points are located, (iii) estimate statistics of different environmental factors such as mean temperature or land cover proportions within these sub-catchments, (iv) derive network topological characteristics, and (v) calculate the connectivity across occurrence points and the distance to dams. Finally, (vi) we will run a simple species distribution model to project the suitable habitat of a given species across the study region. We will use command-line GIS programming within the R environment, hence a good knowledge of R and the concepts of spatial (raster and vector) data is considered a pre-requisite to maximize the benefit of attendance. All code and data will be openly available such that participants can tune the tools on their data after the workshop.

Sally MacIntyre
University of California Santa Barbara, United States, sally@eri.ucsb.edu

Bertram Boehrer, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung GmbH – UFZ, Germany, bertram.boehrer@ufz.de

Date: Saturday, 6 August 2022
Time: Afternoon
Format: Online

The ecological functioning of lakes depends on the interactions between the physical processes that cause stratification and transport, both in the vertical and horizontal, and the nutrients, dissolved gases, plankton and other particulates which interact within this framework. Accurate assessment of controls on changes in temperature, thermal structure and oxygen content, water quality, plankton productivity, and metabolism with changes in land use, introduced species, and climate require an in depth knowledge of these processes. Programs in limnology benefit from training in all areas of limnology, yet physical limnology is often neglected. The goals of this workshop are to provide a knowledge of fundamentals in key aspects of physical limnology for biogeochemists and biologists. Topics to be covered include processes that lead to stratification, mixing and horizontal transport by convective motions, mixing and horizontal transport by shear driven motions and internal waves, pathways of incoming stormwater, gases in lakes, gas exchange across the air-water interface, advances in instrumentation, and hydrodynamic modeling.