The first WETPOL Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Pollutants in Wetlands was jointly organised by Gijs Du Laing and Diederik Rousseau at Ghent (Belgium) in 2005. The symposium attracts scientists, practitioners, policy makers, and stakeholders from around the world together with scientists working on biogeochemical processes in both natural and constructed wetlands in order to create a platform for information exchange between those scientists and also to serve as a forum for the establishment of cooperation initiatives.