Freshwater sustainability and aquatic ecology in a fast-changing world

摘要: Humanity has been changing Earth’s biosphere in unprecedented ways through planetary-scale impacts on geological and biological systems (Steffen et al., 2007; Paerl & Huisman, 2009; Smith & Schindler, 2009). Because water is essential to life and environmental changes have been profoundly affecting the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems, it is critical to identify, understand, and find suitable solutions to the various aquatic sustainability issues of modern world. This need has motivated us to edit two special topics where human impacts on aquatic ecosystems were addressed from several perspectives and scales. One special topic,“Opinions about aquatic ecology in a changing world-perspectives on contemporary issues”, congregated 19 opinion and perspective papers, whereas the other,“Mini-reviews in Applied Limnology-causes, consequences and mitigation of human interventions in aquatic ecosystems”, gathered seven review papers. Contributed work addressed various issues, including effects of climate change on aquatic ecosystem dynamics, fish ecology and fisheries management, aquatic biodiversity conservation, human-caused impacts on freshwater ecosystems, water resources management, and aquatic ecotoxicology. The scale of the studies ranged from global to local, covering a broad spectrum of human-related subjects in freshwater systems in Brazil and several other American and European countries. Here we provide a broad synthesis of the variety of topics addressed in this collection of 26 papers published by Acta Limnologica Brasiliensia. A few papers focused on ecological and biogeochemical …