Limnology global inland waters as part of the Earth System created a sub-discipline called global limnology. This approach considers the role of inland aquatic ecosystems in carbon cycling. Limnology is closely related to aquatic ecology and hydrobiology, which study aquatic organisms and their interactions with the abiotic (non-living) environment. While limnology has substantial overlap with freshwater-focused disciplines (e.g., freshwater biology), it also includes the study of inland salt lakes. The term limnology was coined by François-Alphonse Forel (1841–1912) who established the field with his studies of Lake Geneva. Interest in the discipline rapidly expanded, and in 1922 August Thienemann (a German
Landscape limnology Therefore, the four main themes of landscape limnology are: (1) Patch characteristics: The characteristics of a freshwater ecosystem include its physical morphometry, chemical, and biological features, as well as its boundaries. These boundaries are often more easily defined for aquatic ecosystems than for terrestrial ecosystems (e.g., shoreline, riparian zones, and emergent vegetation zone) and are often a focal-point for important ecosystem processes linking terrestrial and aquatic components. (2) Patch context: The freshwater ecosystem is embedded in a complex terrestrial mosaic (e.g., soils, geology, and land use/cover) that has been shown to drive many within-ecosystem features and processes such as water