Preface to the Siberian lakes special issue

Abstract

This Special Issue of Aquatic Ecology is an update on the ongoing limnological studies on the ecosystems of two saline, meromictic lakes, Lake Shira and Lake Shunet, both located in southern Siberia (Khakasia, Russia). Lake Shira can be termed as a ‘natural laboratory’ for investigations into the lower limits of biodiversity, in view of the complete absence of fish and cladoceran zooplankton in this water body (see below). Both Lake Shira and the neighbouring Lake Shunt have been the focus of limnological research by the Institute of Biophysics (IBP), Krasnoyarsk, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science (SB-RAS), since the late 1990s. Below, we provide a brief historical resume of this research programme and then focus on the main findings documented in this special issue. This first, international cooperative study on the Siberian lakes was carried out from 1999 to 2002 by the IBP and The Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (NIOOKNAW), Nieuwersluis. The universities of Madrid, Spain (Prof. Antonio Quesada), Zurich, Switzerland (Prof. Friedrich Juttner) and the Institute of Computational Modelling, Krasnoyarsk (SB-RAS), were the other main participants. The study on Lake Shira during the first three-years (1999–2001) by this international research team was funded by the European Union (EU) INTAS Grant 97-O519 to the IBP. Two of the undersigned—Andrey G. Degermendzhy, head of the IBP, Krasnoyarsk, and Ramesh D. Gulati, of NIOO-KNAW, Nieuwersluis— were among most active collaborators in this early project. The complete study titled The structure and functioning of Lake Shira ecosystem: an example of Siberian brackish water lakes was published in Aquatic Ecology as a Special Issue (36/2) containing 18 papers (Gulati and Degermendzhy 2002). In addition to summarising studies on the bacterial production, protozoan bacterivory, phytoplankton, the growth of dominant zooplankton and the microbial food web of Lake Shira, this study described the geography and geology, as well as provided data on salient features of water chemistry of Khakasian lakes. The above-mentioned published study formed the basis of a concerted, follow-up research project between The Netherlands and Russia from 2005 to 2008. This new project was funded jointly by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (NWORFBR grant 047.017.012), with one of the undersigned (Wolf M. Mooij) as project coordinator. In Handling editor: Piet Spaak.