Is 44.5 mg/L a measurement of weight or volume?
$50~\mathrm{mg~L^{-1}}$ is an expression of concentration by mass. It means that if you took one litre of the solution and extracted all the metal, the resulting metal would weigh 50 milligrams.   

The other common option is to express concentration in terms of moles per litre ($\mathrm{mol~L^{-1}}$) which means that if you extracted all the solute from one litre of solution, you would have 50 moles of solute.