Interactions between Sediments and Fresh water, Proceedings of an International Symposium, Amsterdam, September 6–10, 1976

Aquatic Botany, 5 (1978) 391--394 391 © Elsevier ScientificPublishing Company, Amsterdam -- Printed in The Netherlands Book Reviews INTERACTIONS BETWEENSEDIMENTS AND FRESH WATER Interactions between Sediments and Fresh Water, Proceedings of an International Symposium, Amsterdam, September 6 - 10, 1976. H.L. Golterman (Editor). Dr W. Junk, B.V. Publishers and Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, Wageningen, The Netherlands, 1977, 473 pp., Dfl. 65.00, ISBN 90-6193-563-6 (Junk), 90-220-0632-8 (Pudoc). It is unfortunate that the practice of publishing symposium proceedings is becoming more widespread. The papers, which are often no more than extended abstracts, fail to convey the full content of the material presented at the meeting and are too often below the standard of contributions that would be accepted by journals operating a critical review system. In order to speed up publication, the papers are usually reproduced by copying the original typescripts, giving an unsatisfactory and uneven format, and there is often no time for the preparation of a detailed subject index without which it is difficult to gain access to the mass of material reproduced. The criticisms can all be levelled at the volume under review but it must be added that the editor has made a valiant attempt to bring order to the material by gathering the papers into logical groups and by providing (together with A.B. Viner and G.F. Lee) a well-written and detailed preface which collates many of the conclusions drawn. However, the organisation of the material in the preface differs from that in the text since the preface refers to the papers as read at the meeting. In the preface, the discussion is organised under the following headings (83 papers): physical transportation and distribution (12 papers), mineralogical reactions, diagenesis (6 papers), phosphate exchange dynamics (21 papers), nutrient effects of artificial sediment additions or removals (4 papers), microbial transformations (17 papers), influence of meiofauna (2 papers), organic material: significance and discrimination (5 papers), heavy metals and other pollutant associations (11 papers), methodology (5 papers). In the text, the following headings are used (70 papers in all): source and composition of sediment (22 papers), sediment formation and rate of sedimentation (7 papers), role of sediments in element cycles (25 papers), water quality, health and management aspects of sediments (12 papers), methods (4 papers). There is no way, apart from reading each contribution in detail, of linking the discussion in the preface to the individual papers. This difficulty could have been avoided by numbering the published papers sequentially and referring to papers by number, where possible, in the preface. From the contents list, it is clear that the discussions at the symposium covered a very wide range of, topics of relevance to freshwater biology,

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although disappointingly few papers were actually written b y biologists. To quote from the preface (p. 4) " A shortcoming of a symposium which has such a high proportion of non-biologists is the scant attention paid to sediment as an ecosystem in itself and to the inseparable interaction between the living and non-living components that the world e c o s y s t e m implies". The papers themselves are necessarily brief and some of them are t o o brief to contain much useful information. After thumbing through the contents list and dipping into the text, most readers will no d o u b t find, as I did, several papers of considerable interest. However, I would not question the opinion of the symposium organisers when they state in the preface (p. 6) that "with some exceptions, extremely little was said that was really new or surprising". This volume is no d o u b t valuable to the participants in the symposium as a m o m e n t o of an interesting and informative meeting. A good subject index (or even a key word index) and some care taken in interlinking the preface with the text would have made it more useful and might have t e m p t e d me to recommend it to a more general audience. M. WHITFIELD

(Plymouth, Gt. Britain)

A BASELINE STUDY OF AQUATIC VEGETATION IN LAKE G E N E V A

Gontribution ~ l'Etude des Macrophytes du L~man. J.B. Lachavanne and R. Wattenhofer. Commission Internationale pour la Protection des Eaux du L~man contre la Pollution, Conservatoire botanique de Gen~ve, 1975, 147 pp. Recent work on the macrophyte flora of Lake Geneva (L6man) has been fragmentary and more localised in comparison with the early complete study of Forel (1901--1904). Thus, in 1969, the International Commission for the protection against pollution of the water of Lake Geneva decided to make a study of the macrophytes of all the lake, to complement studies of the physico-chemical and biological evolution of the lake which had already begun. This task was completed b y t w o young biologists from Geneva and their results are presented in the b o o k which is reviewed here. General data on the aquatic vegetation {Chapter 1 ) includes an interesting table relating the distribution of some of the species which were found to depth and t y p e of b o t t o m deposit. The methods of study are described in Chapter 2. They are largely based on the use of aerial colour photography. Following a summary description of the lake (Chapter 3), an account is given o f the characteristic aquatic species in the lake (Chapter 4). The analysis of the different types of vegetation {Chapter 5) highlights the variation in quantitative abundance and the large differences in the composition of the