13th Symposium on Aquatic Microbial Ecology (SAME 13), on the path to SIL 2016 in Torino, Italy

The road to the SIL Congress 2016 in Torino (Italy) is long and made up of many steps. Both national and international conferences preceding the SIL Congress in 2016 offer opportunities for publicizing the main event and are a testing ground for its organizational structure. The SAME 13 conference is an example of one such preceding meeting, which was held from 8 to 13 September 2013 in Stresa (Italy), on Lake Maggiore, a few km from the Institute of Ecosystem Study (CNR ISE) that will host this conference. The SAME 13 has been a great success both from the scientific and organizational points of view. In fact, the number of participants has doubled compared with the previous SAME. There were in total 460 participants from 58 countries. In the course of a week, a complex and accurate picture of the state of global research on the microbial ecology of our planet's waters was presented.