'Large lakes – Small world': common issues and challenges presented during the joint ELLS-IAGLR 2018 Conference

As freshwater ecosystems, lakes are essential resources on Earth and offer a wide variety of services to nature and society. Large lakes are iconic waterbodies due to their size and the wealth of ecosystem services they provide at local and regional scales. Ecosystem services provided by large lakes usually encompass all four major categories: provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural. Accordingly, it is common that large lakes supply fish and water to surrounding populations that can reach millions of people. At the same time, large lakes provide water storage and facilitate varied recreational activities, making them attractive for tourism activities. Tourism, fisheries, power generation, and transportation are important categories of ecosystem services that deliver easily quantifiable economic benefits (Sterner et al., 2020), making large lakes of remarkable value. Conversely, degradation of lake ecosystems causes costly damages (Mueller et al., 2016; Sterner et al., 2020). As a consequence, managing the quality of large lakes has become a challenge for stakeholders and governmental entities.