Fifty years after the "Homage to Santa Rosalia": Old and new paradigms on biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems

Foreword.- The influence of "Homage to Santa Rosalia" on aquatic ecology: a scientometric approach.- Linking traits to species diversity and community structure in phytoplankton.- Drivers of phytoplankton diversity in Lake Tanganyika.- Rarity, ecological memory, rate of floral change in phytoplankton-and the mystery of the Red Cock.- Diversity and community biomass depend on dispersal and disturbance in microalgal communities.- Influence of nutrients, submerged macrophytes and zooplankton grazing on phytoplankton biomass and diversity along a latitudinal gradient in Europe.- Why are there so many kinds of planktonic consumers? The answer lies in the allometric diet breadth.- Absence of predation eliminates coexistence: experience from the fish-zooplankton interface.- On non-Eltonian methods of hunting Cladocera, or impacts of the introduction of planktivorous fish on zooplankton composition and clear-water phase occurrence in a Mediterranean reservoir.- Out of Alaska: morphological diversity within the genus Eurytemora from its ancestral Alaskan range (Crustacea, Copepoda).- Does lake age affect zooplankton diversity in Mediterranean lakes and reservoirs? A case study from southern Italy.- Homage to Hutchinson: does inter-annual climate variability affect zooplankton density and diversity?.- Homage to the Virgin of Ecology, or why an aquatic insect unadapted to desiccation may maintain populations in very small, temporary Mediterranean streams.- Winning the biodiversity arms race among freshwater gastropods: competition and coexistence through shell variability and predator avoidance.- Stygobiotic crustacean species richness: a question of numbers, a matter of scale.- Santa Rosalia, the icon of biodiversity.

From the reviews:

"The articles comprise a wide range of approaches from reviews to the results of specific studies which deal with biodiversity and its ecological function. ... They provide a perfect paper for the hasty reader which offers a general access to the topics of the book and makes it easy to identify specific articles for further reading. ... I would like to wish the book a broad audience also within the non-ecological community." (Dieter Lessmann, Basic and Applied Ecology, Vol. 13, 2012)