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Stephanie Spahr talks about her focus on water pollution and how simple solutions often require complex knowledge. Rain is her favourite water resource and she likes the idea of Berlin as a sponge city for a future-oriented water management.

Due to global climate change, lakes around the world are getting warmer and freezing over on fewer days of the year. An international research team with Georgiy Kirillin from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) has recently shown that the changes would not have occurred without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Jonathan Jeschke took over as head of the new IGB Department of Evolutionary and Integrative Ecology on 1 January 2022. In an interview, he tells us why integration is his guiding principle, what new methods and approaches he is pursuing, and how he would like to promote young scientists in particular.

Lakes in alpine locations react sensitively to climate change. Researchers led by IGB and the Faculty of Geosciences at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China, have analysed in detail the changes in a lake in the northern Tibetan highlands since the end of the last ice age. Sediment samples dating back thousands of years show strong ecological changes due to rising temperatures and the influence of melting glaciers. 

Justyna Wolinska has successfully passed the six-year tenure track phase, and has now been jointly appointed to a permanent professorship for Aquatic Evolutionary Ecology by IGB and Freie Universität Berlin.

The World Climate Summit in Glasgow recently ended and climate protection is also to be given greater priority in Germany. Rita Adrian, Sonja Jähnig and Mark Gessner from IGB shed light on what climate change and the current political discourse mean for inland waters and aquatic biodiversity.

What happens in water bodies when the water goes and comes back? Dr. Maria Isabel Arce has shown on a lowland river that after drying up and raining, rivers can release more carbon dioxide and methane.

In the run-up to the UN Climate Change Conference, scientific societies in the field of water research once again recommend that the high relevance of inland waters should be better taken into account in the context of climate policy. The scientific findings and data from IGB also prove this urgency.