Oconee River in the context of "Milledgeville, Georgia"

Freshwater biology is the scientific biological study of freshwater ecosystems and is a branch of limnology. This field seeks to understand the relationships between living organisms in their physical environment. These physical environments may include rivers, lakes, streams, ponds, reservoirs, or wetlands. Knowledge from this discipline is also widely used in industrial processes to make use of biological processes involved with sewage treatment and water purification. Water presence and flow is an essential aspect to species distribution and influences when and where species interact in freshwater environments.

In the UK, the Freshwater Biological Association based near Windermere in Cumbria was one of the early institutions to research the biology of freshwater and promote the concepts of trophism in lakes and demonstrated the process of migration from oligotrophic water through mesotrophic to marsh.