News

Over the past two decades, shrimp aquaculture has grown enormously worldwide and consumer awareness of ethical, environmental and sustainability issues has increased. A new IGB Manual provides guidance on how to assess animal welfare in shrimp aquaculture.

For millennia, humans have been shaping water bodies, and in turn, water bodies and the creatures that inhabit them have been shaping us. Aquatic animals and plants have become an integral part of our culture and art.Cultural influences also shape our approach to nature conservation and species protection, thereby either promoting or hindering these efforts. Scientists from IGB investigate the various perspectives.

The 41st Annual Meeting of the German Society for Limnology (DGL) and the 16th Water Research Horizon Conference (WRHC) organised by the Water Science Alliance are being hosted by IGB in collaboration with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

When people think of toxic cyanobacteria, they usually picture green algal blooms. However, these organisms can also grow on aquatic plants, meaning they are found in places where they come particularly close to humans and animals.

Rivers in Germany and across Europe are increasingly suffering from water shortages. Why further deepening of navigation channels cannot provide a sustainable solution to these problems...

Scientific findings demonstrate how phosphorus enters the lake and explain why tackling pollution sources and chemical phosphorus removal by precipitation within the lake are both appropriate measures. Only by combining these approaches can the ecological condition of Saxony-Anhalt's largest lake be improved sustainably, and can the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive and Natura 2000 protected area be met.

Since May 2026, Dr Christian Birkel leads the new IGB research group, ‘Ecohydrological Modelling under Global Change’. In this interview, he explains why the conditions for scenario development vary so much from country to country.

In nature, the rarest ingredient can be the one that holds everything together. In a new article in the Cell Press journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Dr Erika C. Freeman argues that a handful of scarce molecules can shape entire living communities, far out of proportion to how little of them is present. These are what ecologists call “keystone molecules”.