Taxonomy of lakes

Summary

It has been pointed out that the terms ‘Eutrophic’ and ‘Oligotrophic’ adopted to classify the lakes are usually found by many workers to be quite inadequate and very often ambiguous. This presumably may be due to the fact that these terms at a time take many characters of a lake into consideration. This is the reason that application of these to different bodies of water becomes very difficult. Moreover, the other innumerable terms of nomenclature proposed by various workers are equally difficult in application because the shades of their meaning so often overlap each other. Much of the confusion could be avoided if one could define ‘trophy’ as suggested by Faegri, exclusively on the physico-chemical nature of the lake-water. In view of this, a scheme to classify waters on the basis of Pearsall's basic ratio and N, P, and humus contents has been proposed.

It has also been pointed out that if lakes are to be differentiated on the basis of their ecology, various categories will have to be created since no two freshwater bodies can be expected to be exactly identical in their ecological behaviour. This, obviously leads one to think in terms of coining a separate ecological nomenclature for various lake-types within the frame-work of trophic system.

In this paper an attempt has been made to develop a system of nomenclature more or less similar to the binomeal system of Linnaeus. The proposed names are composed of three components, each almost self-explanatory, and these put together provide relevant ecological information pertaining to a lake.