Fifteen years have passed since a small group of researchers at the Czech Geo­ logical Survey boldly convened a conference called GEOMON, Geochemical Monitoring in Representative Basins, held in Prague in 1987. The focus of the original GEOMON conference was rather narrow - monitoring of element pools and fluxes on a small catchment scale. Signaling a desire to broaden the focus to a more biogeochemical orientation, the 1993 meeting, also in Prague, was renamed BIOGEOMON. Tofoster wider international participation and cooperation, in 1997 BIOGEOMON was held at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. The most recent iteration of BIOGEOMON was held at the University of Reading in the United BIOGEOMON meetings to date. At Kingdom and was the largest of the series of Reading, BIOGEOMON hosted 43 invited speakers, 96 contributed talks and over 150 poster presentations. Over 260 delegates came to Reading inAugust 2002 from 25 countries around the world. At Reading, themes that always have been strong at BIOGEOMON were con­ tinued: catchment monitoring and manipulations, catchment and regional-scale modeling, nitrogen transformations and processes, and stable and radiogenic iso­ topes in the environment. Beyond these traditionally emphasized themes, other sessions focused on mercury and metal dynamics, phosphorus, scaling of biogeo­ chemical processes, terrestrial DOC and soil organic matter, rhizosphere biogeo­ chemistry, biogeochemistry of restored ecosystems, and archives of global change on the continents. Most of these themes are represented in this Special Issue, a collection of peer-reviewed articles.