Their story began 500 million years ago, but we only started to get to know them in 1746, when Linné described the first ostracod species. Vividly portraying the freshwater ostracods, this comprehensive reference work gathers the knowledge gained during some 250 years, but which to date has remained scattered throughout the literature. It starts with an introduction to the class Ostracoda with a special focus on freshwater ostracods and highlights practical methods in their study. The systematic part includes an introduction to all families; identification keys for all subfamilies, genera and species; diagnoses for each subfamily and genus; and lists of synonyms and distribution of species. The text is richly illustrated with distribution maps, line drawings of key generic characteristics, and numerous SEM photographs. Serving as an excellent starting point for all further research on freshwater ostracods, it can be widely used not only by ostracodologists, but also by crustaceologists, evolutionists and ecologists.

The Festschrift Eugen Karl Kempf is a proceedings volume of the 15th International German Ostracodologists’ Meeting which was held October 11th to 14th, 2012 by the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy of the University of Cologne. The selected contributions cover a broad range of biological and palaeontological topics that rely on sound taxonomy and serve as a tribute to the Kempf Database of Ostracoda including a biography on Eugen Karl Kempf. In detail, the scientific contributions are covering freshwater and marine genera/species and the parasitic family Entocytherids. Revisions of genera and descriptions of new species are one focus, but also new studies on biogeography, ecology and morphology add to the value of the proceeding. Contributors are: Anja Adler, Qing-Chao Chen, Dan L. Danielopol, Laurent Decrouy, Martin Gross, Simon Hofmann, Dietmar Keyser, Khai-Zhi Li, Renate Matzke-Karasz, Claude Meisch, Francesc Mesquita-Joanes, Alexandre Mestre, Munef Mohammed, Juan S. Monrós, Nataša Mori, Christina Nagler, Tadeusz Namiotko, Werner E. Piller, Burkhard Scharf, Torsten W. Vennemann, Finn A. Viehberg, Claudia Wrozyna, Jian-Quian Yin, Dayou Zhai, Wanhe Zhao

Thorp and Covich's Freshwater Invertebrates: Keys to Palaearctic Fauna, Fourth Edition, is part of a multivolume series covering inland water invertebrates of the world that began with Vol. I: Ecology and General Biology (2015), then Vol. II (2016) Keys to Nearctic Fauna, and finally in Vol. III (2018) Keys to Neotropical Hexapoda (insects and springtails). It now continues with identification keys for Palearctic invertebrates in Vol. IV. Two other volumes currently in development focus on general invertebrates of the Neotropical/Antarctic, and Australasian Bioregions. Other volumes in the early planning stages include Afrotropical and Oriental/Oceanic Bioregions. All volumes are designed for multiple uses and levels of expertise by professionals in universities, government agencies and private companies, as well as by graduate and undergraduate students. - Provides identification keys for inland water (fresh to saline) invertebrates of the Palearctic Zoogeographic Region, from Iceland to Russia, and from the northern Pole region to Saharan Africa in the west, through the Middle East, and to the central China and Japan in the east - Presents identification keys for aquatic invertebrates to the genus or species level for many groups and to family for Hexapoda, with the keys progressing from higher to lower taxonomic levels - Includes a general introduction and sections on limitations, terminology and morphology, material preparation and preservation and references

Thorp and Covich's Freshwater Invertebrates: Keys to Nearctic Fauna, Fourth Edition presents a comprehensive revision and expansion of this trusted professional reference manual and educational textbook—from a single North American tome into a developing multivolume series covering inland water invertebrates of the world. Readers familiar with the first three editions will welcome this new volume. The series, now entitled Thorp and Covich's Freshwater Invertebrates, (edited by J.H. Thorp), began with Volume I: Ecology and General Biology, (edited by J.H. Thorp and D.C. Rogers). It now continues in Volume II with taxonomic coverage of inland water invertebrates of the Nearctic zoogeographic region. As in previous editions, all volumes of the fourth edition are designed for multiple uses and levels of expertise by professionals in universities, government agencies, and private companies, as well as by undergraduate and graduate students. - Features zoogeographic coverage for all of North America, south to the general area of the Tropic of Cancer, and Greenland and Bermuda - Provides keys to families of freshwater insects - Provides keys to all other inland water invertebrates at the taxonomic level appropriate for the current scientific knowledge - Includes multiple taxonomic keys in each chapter that progress from higher to lower taxonomic levels, thereby allowing users to work up to their level of need and expertise - Presents additional material in each chapter on group introduction, limitations to the keys, terminology and morphology, material preparation and preservation, and references

Identification and Ecology of Freshwater Arthropods in the Mediterranean Basin covers the entire Mediterranean basin, including parts of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean islands, but excluding other biogeographic locations with Mediterranean climates located outside the region. The book provides an extensive description of the taxonomy and ecology of aquatic arthropods encountered in lentic and lotic habitats, as well as in less studied underground and estuarine habitats. It offers expanded taxonomic identification keys to major groups of arthropods with a description of their ecology and distribution. Keys for insects include aquatic larval stages and water-dwelling adults of Coleoptera and Heteroptera. Additional sections focus on taxa that can be encountered in adjacent brackish and estuary ecosystems as long as the taxon primarily occurs in freshwaters. This is a much-needed, comprehensive resource on the taxonomy and ecology of freshwater arthropods with an introduction to recent molecular tools for identifications. It will be particularly useful for freshwater ecologists, limnologists, environmentalists and students in the ecological sciences. - Presents taxonomic keys to genera and species to the majority of aquatic arthropod families - Provides coverage of all freshwater ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin, with case studies and examples - Includes numerous photographs of the aquatic arthropods described in the chapters - Covers the ecology and taxonomy of organisms living in more traditionally studied lakes and streams as well as in less studied underground and estuarine habitats

Fundamentals of Tropical Freshwater Wetlands: From Ecology to Conservation Management is a practical guide and important tool for practitioners and educators interested in the ecology, conservation and management of wetlands in tropical/subtropical regions. The book is written in such a way that, in addition to scientists and managers, it is accessible to non-specialist readers. Organized into three themed sections and twenty-three chapters, this volume covers a variety of topics, exposing the reader to a full range of scientific, conservation and management issues. Each chapter has been written by specialists in the topic being presented. The book recognizes that wetland conservation, science and management are interlinked disciplines, and so it attempts to combine several perspectives to highlight the interdependence between the various professions that deal with issues in these environments. Within each chapter extensive cross-referencing is included, so as to help the reader link related aspects of the issues being discussed. - Contributed to by global experts in the field of tropical wetlands - Includes case studies and worked examples, enabling the reader to recreate the work already done - Focuses on tropical systems not available in any other book

Wetlands are among the world’s most valuable and most threatened habitats, and in these crucially important ecosystems, the invertebrate fauna holds a focal position. Most of the biological diversity in wetlands is found within resident invertebrate assemblages, and those invertebrates are the primary trophic link between lower plants and higher vertebrates (e.g. amphibians, fish, and birds). As such, most scientists, managers, consultants, and students who work in the world’s wetlands should become better informed about the invertebrate components in their habitats of interest. Our book serves to fill this need by assembling the world’s most prominent ecologists working on freshwater wetland invertebrates, and having them provide authoritative perspectives on each the world’s most important freshwater wetland types. The initial chapter of the book provides a primer on freshwater wetland invertebrates, including how they are uniquely adapted for life in wetland environments and how they contribute to important ecological functions in wetland ecosystems. The next 15 chapters deal with invertebrates in the major wetlands across the globe (rock pools, alpine ponds, temperate temporary ponds, Mediterranean temporary ponds, turloughs, peatlands, permanent marshes, Great Lakes marshes, Everglades, springs, beaver ponds, temperate floodplains, neotropical floodplains, created wetlands, waterfowl marshes), each chapter written by groups of prominent scientists intimately knowledgeable about the individual wetland types. Each chapter reviews the relevant literature, provides a synthesis of the most important ecological controls on the resident invertebrate fauna, and highlights important conservation concerns. The final chapter synthesizes the 15 habitat-based chapters, providing a macroscopic perspective on natural variation of invertebrate assemblage structure across the world’s wetlands and a paradigm for understanding how global variation and environmental factors shape wetland invertebrate communities.

This is the eighth volume of a ten-volume series on The Natural History of the Crustacea. The volume examines Evolution and Biogeography, and the first part of this volume is entirely dedicated to the explanation of the origins and successful establishment of the Crustacea in the oceans. In the second part of the book, the biogeography of the Crustacea is explored in order to infer how they conquered different biomes globally while adapting to a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial conditions. The final section examines more general patterns and processes, and the chapters offer useful insight into the future of crustaceans.

This book offers a comprehensive study of species- and genus-level diversity and chorology of the global freshwater fauna to date. It gives a state of the art assessment of the diversity and distribution of Metazoa in the continental waters of the world.

"As a young and impetuous gradate student, I thought that sorting out the phylogeny of crustaceans would simply take but a little time and concerted effort to eventually reveal the truth. Everyone could then agree and further research would proceed apace. How naïve I was. First of all, I had never heard of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems and hence the impossibility of achieving such an end. But even so, what progress we might have made turned out to take longer than anyone could have imagined, and the effort would be immense involving many people and a number of laboratories-and that task still continues. What no one could foresee in the 1960s was that the focus of everyone's attentions would completely transform. Traditional pure anatomy would be augmented with more sophisticated developmental genetic work. Concurrent with that effort molecular sequencing would become a remarkably effective tool. And with these new sources of data, the concept of "crustaceans" would yield to a new construct-Pancrustacea-within which the arthropods that we referred to by the name of "Crustacea" became a series of monophyletic smaller groups that mark a paraphyletic transition from a mandibulate ancestor all the way up to a crown group that few in the 1960s expected-Hexapoda emerged within the pancrustaceans"--