Limnology has greatly influenced the field of freshwater fisheries science, particularly fisheries biology. However, both fields became increasingly disconnected during the 20 th century, when major research traditions within limnology became more tightly focused and humans, even fish, were externalized. A paradigm shift occurring within freshwater fisheries science today is redefining research questions and approaches and is further challenging the role of limnology within fisheries science. Modern fisheries science has become a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and sometimes transdisciplinary endeavour that melds the social with the natural sciences to understand fisheries as social-ecological systems. Limnology remains important to capture some of the dynamics inherent in social-ecological fisheries systems, but becomes one of the many necessary scientific disciplines of fisheries science, rather than the primary supporting science that it used to be. To improve scholarly communication between limnologists and freshwater fisheries scientists, major shifts in perspective are needed.
It is hardly understandable why fish are only regarded as a component of the aquatic ecosystem or a means for biomanipulation in modern textbooks on limnology or limno-ecology, while the fisheries science as a natural component of theoretical and applied limnology in the spirit of THIENEMANN is not mentioned in the table of contents!H.-J. ELSTER, 1993 (translated from German)
IntroductionLimnology as a scientific discipline studies the structure and function of inland waters. It has been called a subfield of ecology (LAMPERT and SOMMER, 1999) that includes "everything that affects fresh water" (NAUMANN and THIENEMANN, 1922). This encompasses biological, physical, chemical, geological and hydrological aspects. Limnological thinking, from its early days in the late 19 th century, has greatly influenced freshwater fisheries science, particularly freshwater fisheries biology (ELSTER, 1974(ELSTER, , 1993. Limnology itself has traditionally been viewed as a "synthetic science for which purely zoological or botanical * Corresponding author 542 R. ARLINGHAUS et al.