LIMNOLOGY, LAKE BASINS, LAKE WATERS

Limnology is a border discipline between geography, hydrology and biology, and is also closely connected with other sciences, from it borrows research methods. Physical limnology (the geography of lakes), studies lake biotopes, and biological limnology (the biology of lakes), studies lake biocoenoses. The father of limnology is the Swiss scientist F.A. Forel, the author of a three-volume entitled Le Leman: monographie limnologique (1892-1904), which focuses on the geology physics, chemistry and biology of lakes. He was also author of the first textbook of limnology, Handbuch der Seenkunde: allgemeine Limnologie,(1901). Since both the lake biotope and its biohydrocoenosis make up a single whole, the lake and lakes, respectively, represent the most typical systems in nature. They could be called limnosystems (lacustrine ecosystems), a microcosm in itself, as the American biologist St.A. Forbes put it (1887).