7th International Conference on Salt Lake Research  (Click here for Abstracts)

The Seventh International Conference on Salt Lakes was held in Death Valley National Park, California, USA, in September 1999. It was sponsored by the International Society for Salt Lake Research, Societas Internationalis Limnologiae, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Since 1979 a series of international symposia on inland saline waters have served to strengthen and expand the scope of limnological research on salt lakes. The seventh conference continued this tradition with a set of plenary talks and oral and poster sessions (Abstracts). The sessions focused on promising research directions including the ecology of microbial communities; the influence of habitat geochemistry on biogeography of flora and fauna; physical and geochemical processes; and, the conservation of inland saline waters. Sixty participants from eleven countries participated. The venue of the conference in Death Valley encouraged informal interactions in a striking landscape rich in saline environments.

A post conference tour visited a wide variety of saline ecosystems located on the western edge of the North American Great Basin, a region noted for its remarkable ecological diversity and striking beauty. Major stops included Owens, Mono, Walker, Big Soda, and Pyramid lakes.

Manuscripts derived from the conference were peer reviewed and published as a special issue of Hydrobiologia (2001, Volume 466) and distributed as a book in the series, Developments in Hydrobiology.

Inland saline waters are threatened worldwide by diversion and pollution of their inflows, introductions of exotic species and economic development of these saline habitats. Several sessions at the conference concerned anthropogenic impacts and conservation with special attention paid to Walker Lake, Nevada (USA), the Salton Sea, Mono and Owens lakes and Death Valley, California (USA), Siberian salt lakes and salinization in Australia. Continued local, national and international efforts are required to inform the public and decision makers about the ecological problems faced by saline waters.

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