Pollution control by wetlands

The 2nd International Symposium on Wetland Pollutant Dynamics and Control (WETPOL 2007), organised by the Department of Geography of the University of Tartu (Estonia) in co-operation with partners from the Estonian University of Life Sciences (Tartu, Estonia), Ghent University (Belgium), and the UNESCO-IHE (Delft, The Netherlands), was held 16-20 September 2007, in Tartu, Estonia. At this meeting, 140 oral presentations (including 9 keynote speeches) and 70 posters by representatives from 38 countries were presented. About half of the presentations considered purification processes in both semi-natural and constructed wetlands. The editorial paper highlights trends in studying the cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, heavy metals, and organic pollutants in wetlands, but also in the modelling of pollutant removal and the functioning of plants in the wetland environment. It also describes the WETPOL 2007 meeting, which served as the source of the selected papers, and briefly explains the main aspects of these papers.