Limnology in the 21st Century: celebrating 75 years of ecological research in Pallanza

In order to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Ecosystem Study, we published a special issue of Journal of Limnology, dealing with potential new advances in limnology. Our idea was to invite scientists to write on how new advances can help limnology, and how limnology can help the general advancement of science. We build on the previous experiences of the already available special issues, by going a step further. In fact, Limnology, once a fundamental part of ecological studies, it has experienced a failure to keep up with the moving scientific trends. Limnologists working in the past were among the leading names in ecology, and most of their studies on plankton and eutrophication lead to the developments of current ecological sciences. Nowadays, lakes, ponds, and swamps may still be exploited to advance science. They could be used as model systems, for manipulation experiments, for their high local biological diversity, for the availability of many long-term data series, for their response to environmental changes, and for everything we learned from polluting and recovering them. The rationale of this volume is to deal with this problem, in order to give limnology its important place in science again.