Kirjahaku

In this context morphology means the study of lake fonns and fonn elements, their genesis (from geographical and geological viewpoints) and their role in a broad physical lirnnological perspective. Lake morphometry deals with the quantification and measurement of these forms and fonn elements. MOrphometric data are of fundamental importance in most limnological and hydrological projects. This is obvious to most scientists in the field, but it is just as evident that lake morphology and lake morphometry are compara- tively neglected topics of scientific endeavour. One can take the classical work of Welch - "Limnological methods" - as an example. This book was pub- lished in 1948 and it is still used as the main reference (see e. g. Wetzel, 1975), in spite of the fact that the source of most morphometric data, the bathymetric map, today is practically always constructed from hydrographic surveys conducted with echosounding equipment, a technique that became widely used and accepted only after 1948. Echosounding is not even mentioned in Welch~s book. One can also point out that all scale-dependent morphometric parameters, like the shoreline length, the shore development and the lake bottom roughness, up till quite recently, have had limited quantitative re- levance, since these parameters could not be defined unambiguously.

The accident of Chernobyl enabled the scientific community to study nuclear fall-out effects in situ establishing new kinds of interpretation methods. This study presents the development of ecometric analysis, mainly based on load diagrammes for entire ecosystems and their interpretation with regard to dynamic modeling. Practitioners and scientists in ecology, environmental sciences, limnology, hydrology and geosciences but also in agricultural and life sciences will profit from this textbook. It is the first book on ecometric modeling. Ecometry is an approach to establish so-called load diagrams (effect-dose-sensitivity diagrams) for entire ecosystems like lakes or defined coastal areas. Central aspects concern statistical relationships and causal relationships, clusters and functional groups of interrelated environmental parameters, area- and time compatible data, benefits and drawbacks with the ecometric approach, and the information value of parameters that vary in time and space. The book uses a new and comprehensive set of data on radioactive caesium in lakes (after the Chernobyl accident) to illustrate the various principles and steps in the protocol to establish load diagrammes. The ecometric approach can be used for most pollutants in different types of ecosystems.