Prolog

✍ Scribed by Hannes Flühler; Walter Giger; Albert Waldvogel

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 88 KB
• Volume: 68
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0049-6979
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00479388

✦ Synopsis

The contributions in this special issue emerged from the WaBoLu-Project which was initiated in 1985 by Wemer Stumm at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Ztirich (ETHZ). The project label "WaBoLu" is an acronym for "water, soil and air", a label we share by coincidence with this journal. It signals the environmental context and target systems for both, the journal and our project. The research program was structured in three clusters, i) particulate matter in the atmosphere (including snow crystals) and their role in sorbing and capturing atmospheric gases and aerosols, ii) transport and phase exchange of solutes in soils and well defined porous media (soil analogons), and iii) biological systems of different spatial scale.

The basic ideas of this multidisciplinary project were the integration of researchers engaged and specialized in non-overlapping disciplines and doing environmental research by concentrating on understanding the driving processes in detail. The first of the two goals, the integration of the scientists involved, meant co-education in a scientific sense by mildly forcing the group members to become interested in fields outside of their expertise. This is probably the most crucial but at the same time the most difficult step in the process of integrating disciplines. To stimulate the interest of scientists with an "abiotic" view ot the environment for the role of organisms was the most difficult task in this respect. Apparently, it is easier or more attractive for biologists to focus on abiotic stystems than the reverse. The second goal, searching for a better understanding of relevant aspects, is another valuable feature of this project which clearly reflects Werner Stumm's view of environmental research. Some of the selected constitutents and systems were artifical and "unnatural" in a sense, but they do have properties which are relevant or even dominant in natural systems. We emphasize these common features because we feel that funding agencies, editorial boards (not that of this journal obviously), and as a consequence some scientists and not the least the research managers and administrators of their institutions are leaning often too exclusively toward an immediate applicability of their research instead of balancing studies which complement each other to advance our understanding and, at the same time, to sharpen our perception for the problems out there in the waters, air and soil. Progress in environmental research depends largely on the range of observation scales and on the variable degrees of splitting and lumping the system's characteristics or its driving mechanisms. In this project it was the splitter's turn but they did it together. In short, to experiment on a microscale under rigorously controlled conditions using glass beads, artificially produced atmospheric particles and aerosols, and an artificial symbiosis of mykorrhizal fungi and sterile seedlings while being confronted with results from field-scale experiments with limited experimental control serves as a good educational platform and generates new insights and ideas. It is not meant to provide the basis for scaling up from the laboratory findings to field scale but it improved our understanding of the governing processes and, perhaps even more important, of the limits of our methods. The outcome of this research activity and the corresponding integration process can be found in the following papers.s

In the name of all project members we would like to express our gratitude to Werner Stumm and to acknowledge his merits for this lesson in problem-oriented environmental research. It is his legacy to us and to many others before he withdrew on retirement.