A six-day conference on aquatic sciences ended on Friday in the western Japanese city of Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, with participation of more than 1,300 specialists and researchers from over 40 countries.

The Otsu event, held in "Biwako Hall," a major conference hall on the shore of Lake Biwa in the prefecture, was organized by Association for the Science of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) with the aim to share new knowledge, insights, and discoveries about the world's lakes, rivers and oceans, and to address the many challenges that these ecosystems are now facing.

According to ASLO, the meeting was held for the first time in Asia, offering more than 100 sessions with lectures and presentations which covered a wide range of topics, such as" aquatic ecosystems worldwide impacted by human activities and climate change", "water interactions in freshwater and marine environments" or "carbon storage and evasion in natural wetlands and freshwater reservoirs".

Dr. John Downing, President of ASLO, told Xinhua after the event that one of the important discussion was how tsunami waves affect water resources on land, and they could show many examples from the latest disaster in Japan.

Hailing the meeting as excellent and expressing satisfaction with the results of the meeting, he said participants exchanged views over correlation between global climate change and our planets' water supply.