Prof. Dr. Wolfgang J. Junk is the retired head of the Working Group of Tropical Ecology at the former Max-Planck-Institute for Limnology at Plön, Germany. He worked more than 40 years in the Brazilian Amazon region in cooperation with the National Amazon Research Institute (INPA) at Manaus, and 20 years in the Pantanal, an other large neotropical wetland, in cooperation with the Federal University of Mato Grosso, Brazil. He edited several books and published about 250 articles about different aspects of floodplain ecology. Prof. Junk is since 1991 corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and received many honours, among them the Brazilian Grande Cruz (1998), the International Fellow Award of the Society of Wetland Scientist‘s (1999), and the Cross of merit first class of the Federal Republic of Germany (2008). Dr. Maria Teresa F. Piedade is head of the Wetlands Working Group and the MAUA group on the monitoring of Amazonian wetlands. Both groups are linked to the National Amazon Research Institute (INPA), Manaus, Brazil, where she is employed. She works on the ecology of the Amazon floodplains for more than three decades being for about 20 years the Brazilian counterpart of the cooperation between INPA and the Max-Planck-Institute for Limnology (Ploen - until 2007) and Chemistry (Mainz – from 2007 to the present). She supervised more than 50 students and published about 100 articles and book chapters on the vegetation of wetlands and its ecology. Currently she participates of several international committees as the SSC-LBA and the “Limnology in Developing Countries (Tropical Countries)” of the SIL. Dr. Florian Wittmann, Dr. Jochen Schöngart und PD Dr. Pia Parolin have worked for many years with Prof. Junk and Dr. Piedade at INPA in Manaus and are internationally recognized experts in their specific research fields.
