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Our understanding of the ecology of running waters has come a long way during the past few years. From being a largely descriptive subject, with a few under tones concerned with such things as fisheries, pollution or control of blackflies, it has evolved into a discipline with hypotheses, such as the River Continuum Concept (Vannote et a/. 1980), and even a book suggesting that it offers opportunity for the testing of ecological theory (Barnes & Minshall 1983). However, perusal of the literature reveals that, although some of the very early studies were concerned with large rivers (references in Hynes 1970), the great mass of the work that has been done on running water has been on streams and small rivers, and information on larger rivers is either on such limited topics as fisheries or plankton, scattered among the journals, or not available to the general limnologist. The only exceptions are a few books in this series of publications, such as those on the Nile (Rz6ska 1976), the Volga (Morduckai Boltovskoi 1979) and the Amazon {Sioli 1984), and the recent compendium by Whitton (1984) on European rivers, among which there are a few that rate as large.
List of contents
1. River systems as ecological units: An introduction to the ecology of river systems.- 2. The Niger River system.- 3. The Nile River system.- 4. The Orange-Vaal River system.- 5. The Volta River system.- 6. The Zaïre River system.- 7. The Zambezi River system.- 8. The Amazon River system.- 9. The Colorado River system.- 10. The Mackenzie River system.- 11. The Paraná River system.- 12. The Uruguay River system.- 13. The Murray-Darling River system.- 14. The Mekong River system.- Index of organisms.- Index of floodplain, lake, reservoir, river and swamp systems.
