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This Special Issue of Water, Air and Soil Pollution offers original
contributions from BIOGEOMON, an international symposium on
ecosystem behavior and the evaluation of integrated monitoring of
small catchments, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September
1993. The meeting attracted nearly 200 scientists from 27 countries
on five continents. BIOGEOMON was a loose continuation of another
international meeting, GEOMON, which was held in Prague in 1987.
Both sym posia provided a forum for the discussion of ideas on
environmental problems in western and eastern Europe, with
important contributions from the American continent. With the
dramatic collapse of the iron curtain, it was our hope that more so
than GEOMON, BIOGEOMON would provide opportunities for the free
exchange of ideas, fostering the development of research
collaborations between its participants. With international
openness comes the increasing realization that every indus
trialized nation has its own legacy of environmental degradation.
Anthropogenic impacts differ in severity and scale; air and water
transport of pollutants transform local impacts into regional and
global ones, ignoring political boundaries and eco nomic
differences. Environmental consequences of anthropogenic activities
often are detectable at the ecosystem level. Thus, the challenge of
ecosystem science, and to the individuals who practice it, is to
develop a comprehensive understanding of ecosystem function in the
past and at present, and to apply such understanding toward
minimizing future insults to the local, regional, and global
environment.
The BIOGEOMON conference, held in Prague, September 1993, was
dedicated to the use of geochemistry and biology in the elucidation
of biogeochemical processes in the context of research on small
catchments, which are natural systems that lend themselves to the
study of environmental problems at the ecosystem level.
Biogeochemical Monitoring in Small Catchments, which contains
reviewed papers from the conference, includes long-term studies of
nutrient cycling in forested catchments, effects of anthropogenic
action on streamwater chemistry, stable isotope studies for tracing
biogeochemical processes, determination of the process rates, and
mathematical modelling of ecosystem behaviour and mass fluxes. For
research scientists and students of ecology, biology, hydrology and
geochemistry as well as professionals in natural resources
management.
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