A Manual of Lake Morphometry

In this context morphology means the study of lake fonns and fonn elements, their genesis (from geographical and geological viewpoints) and their role in a broad physical lirnnological perspective. Lake morphometry deals with the quantification and measurement of these forms and fonn elements. MOrphometric data are of fundamental importance in most limnological and hydrological projects. This is obvious to most scientists in the field, but it is just as evident that lake morphology and lake morphometry are compara- tively neglected topics of scientific endeavour. One can take the classical work of Welch - "Limnological methods" - as an example. This book was pub- lished in 1948 and it is still used as the main reference (see e. g. Wetzel, 1975), in spite of the fact that the source of most morphometric data, the bathymetric map, today is practically always constructed from hydrographic surveys conducted with echosounding equipment, a technique that became widely used and accepted only after 1948. Echosounding is not even mentioned in Welch s book. One can also point out that all scale-dependent morphometric parameters, like the shoreline length, the shore development and the lake bottom roughness, up till quite recently, have had limited quantitative re- levance, since these parameters could not be defined unambiguously.