Limnologica  Ecology and Management of Inland Waters 
Review sheet
Received:
2.1.2006
Editor-in-chief:
Rainer Koschel
Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries
Alte Fischerhütte 2
D – 16775 Stechlin-Neuglobsow
Phone: +49 (0)33082 699-0
e-mail: rko@igb-berlin.de
Editors:
Jürgen Benndorf, Dresden
Walter Geller, Magdeburg
Daniel Hering, Essen
Editorial Assistant:
Edith Tesch
Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries
Alte Fischerhütte 2
D – 16775 Stechlin
Phone: +49 (0)33082 699-0
e-mail: tesch@igb-berlin.de
Scope:
Any aspects of limnology and hydrobiology of inland waters and adjacent
biotopes including any activities of benthonic, fish, neustonic, nektonic,
periphytic, planktonic communities and organisms together with their ecology,
bioindication and systematics.
Special attention will be paid to nutrient and energy flow, water-internal
control mechanisms, and ecological modelling and simulation in/of
water ecosystems, as well as ecological (ecotechnological) water quality
and fisheries management.
Not acceptable are:
Purely biochemical, genetical, hydrological, hydrophysical, microbial,
physiological, taxonomical, or marine biological work, that, while using inland
water test organisms, is unrelated to the scope of LIMNOLOGICA.
Author:
Ximena Aguilera, Steven Declerck, Luc De Meester, Mabel Maldonado, &
Frans Ollevier
Title of paper:
Tropical high Andes lakes: a limnological and aquatic ecological profile
Number of manuscript:
e-mail: bennd@rcs.urz.tu-dresden.de
e-mail: geller@gm.ufz.de
e-mail: daniel.hering@uni-essen.de
2006/01
Yes
No
See
comments
sheet
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2.1. acceptable for publication in its present form?
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2.2. acceptable for publication with minor revision?
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2.3. acceptable for publication only with major revision?
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2.4. unacceptable?
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1. Is this paper original and does it fall within the
scope of LIMNOLOGICA?
2. Is this paper:
3. If acceptable:
3.1. as a full article with high priority?
3.2. as a full article with low priority (routine)?
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3.3. as a short note?
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4.1. the formulation of the title of the article?
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4.2. the length and contents of the abstracts?
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4.3. the quality of the figures and tables?
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4.4. the key words (are they necessary and informative)
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4. Do you suggest changes (additions, amendments, etc.)
regarding:
5. Please list your comments and queries regarding the contents, length, organisation of the
manuscript and the quality of the figures, tables and language and style on the enclosed
comments sheet. Your comments will be transmitted to the author(s) anonymously, unless you
decide otherwise.
The manuscript brings an important contribution to the limnology of the Andes eastern cordillera lakes
of Bolivia. It shows that the major driving fource of these lakes is the lake productivity (bottom up)
instead of fish predation. The authors show good capabilities in general limnology and data analysis
but the manuscript needs some improvements. The major drawbacks are related to poor literature
review, problems in literature citations, poor quality of some tables and figures. I also suggest
changing the title of the manuscript in order to reflect the great emphasis given by the authors to the
(absence?) ecological role of the exotic rainbowtrout in the studied lakes.
Other minor corrections:
1) Abstract: The word phytoplankton should be corrected.
2) Introduction (second paragraph): give a literature support of the geographic division of Bolivian
Andes. There are several classifications of this mountain region in the literature.
3) The authors should explicit the objectives/hypothesis of the manuscript.
4) Methods: be more explicit in relation to the methodology of nutrient analysis. The citation of
APHA is not appropriate since we can find several methods for each single variable in this
book.
5) Methods/Data analysis: some phrases belong to the results.
6) Results (pg.8): all lakes studies are quite small (up tp to 50 ha) and shallow (up to 30m).
Avoid the term: “large and deep” lakes.
7) It is almost impossible to read the last section of the results (lake typology). The authors
should improve the writing style using less numbers and more ecology/biology.
8) The discussion is centered in the ecological role of an exotic fish species: rainbow trout. In my
understanding, the authors have two choices at this point: (a) maintain the discussion in the
present form and change the title of the manuscript or (b) maintain the title of the manuscript
and rewrite the discussion in order to give a real ecological profile of the studied lakes.
9) Figure 1: the lakes should be represented in a more appropriate way. Use, for instance, GIS
tools like the google earth to represent the lakes instead of using simply large dots !
10) Table 1: give the area, z max and z mean of each lake.
11) Table 2: redo the table using each group of lake given by PCA. Thus, the statistics of each
lake group should be given separately.
Belo Horizonte, March, 28, 2006
Prof. Ricardo Motta Pinto Coelho
Departamento de Biologia Geral
ICB/UFMG
31270-901 Belo Horizonte (MG)
Telefax: ++ 55 31 34992605
E-mail: rmpc@icb.ufmg.br