News

The ongoing war in Ukraine is having multiple impacts on the country’s water sector, according to a recent study led by IGB and the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research (SGN) that has been published in the journal Nature Sustainability.  In addition to the horror of the direct consequences of war, the destruction of water infrastructure also carries long-term consequences and risks for the population, the environment and global food security.

Not only forests and dry pastures can burn, fires can also start in peatlands. However, due to the soil moisture and lacking oxygen in the soil, the land does not burn ablaze, but smoulders. These smouldering fires can release considerable greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, because peatland soils store much more carbon than other soils and also large amounts of nutrients. Researchers led by the University of Rostock with IGB have now shown that smoldering fires in peatlands therefore also involve a high risk of polluting adjacent freshwaters or groundwater.

Mass developments of cyanobacteria, so-called blue-green algae blooms, repeatedly threaten the quality of water bodies and drinking water resources worldwide. Cyanobacteria are considered to be heat-loving, and massive algal blooms are reported mainly in summer, when monitoring is particularly close. Now, an international research network involving IGB has shown that cyanobacterial blooms can also occur at colder temperatures - even under ice. If the algal blooms go unnoticed, there are risks to drinking water production.

The UN Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP 15) has emphasized again how important the protection of biodiversity is for us humans. One goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is to maintain and restore the "functions and services of ecosystems". An international research team led by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Climate Adaptation Science Centers and IGB has worked out which ecosystem services most depend on biodiversity in freshwater. It‘s more than just the edible fish and recreational that you might expect and they are all at risk.

Little is known about how biological systems like the brain or a swarm of fish manage to optimally bring together a multitude of individual pieces of information from different locations. There is a hypothesis according to which the best performance of the brain lies at the border between order and chaos, in the state of so-called criticality. Researchers of the Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence" from Humboldt-Universität (HU), the Technical University of Berlin (TU), and IGB have now been able to demonstrate this hypothesis on a large school of fish.

IGB has reported the presence of the invasive bloody-red mysid (Hemimysis anomala) for the first time during recent surveys in Lake Stechlin. The current state of research shows that Hemimysis can enter the waters via a variety of introduction pathways, for example via water ways, water birds or water sports equipment. The extent of the distribution and the consequences for the lake‘s ecosystem cannot yet be estimated, but are being further investigated by IGB.

Microorganisms help to keep the water of lakes clean. In the process, they also detoxify the nitrogen compound ammonium, which is introduced into water bodies by fertilizers, for example, and is also produced naturally by metabolic processes. An international team led by the German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (DSMZ) with IGB researchers Hans-Peter Grossart and Danny Ionescu has now shown that this detoxification of ammonium in the depths of European lakes is only sustained by an extremely small number of specific archaebacteria species.

Urbanization goes hand in hand with a considerable sealing of soils. About 20 percent of the newly sealed area is not in urban areas, but in rural areas. However, calculations of nutrient fluxes into water bodies have not taken these new sealings in rural areas into account, because these are often based on land use maps and consider urban areas.