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On 2 March 2023, an international team of researchers raised concerns about the impact of Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine's freshwater resources, water infrastructure and environment. Now, with the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on 6 June 2023, the worst feared scenario has become a reality. In a joint statement, Dr Oleksandra Shumilova of IGB and Professor Klement Tockner, Director of the Senckenberg – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research (SGN), stress the serious consequences of this ecological disaster.

Oxygen is becoming increasingly scarce in deeper layers of lakes and reservoirs due to high nutrient inputs and climate change. As a result, the living conditions of fish and invertebrates deteriorate, greenhouse gases are increasingly produced, and nutrient cycles intensify. In addition, hydrogen sulphide, which is toxic to higher organisms, can accumulate.  The treatment of oxygen deficient deep water to produce drinking water is associated with high costs.

Imagine being able to access a virtual platform that not only provides access to data from a wide range of aquatic disciplines but also enables smooth processing and analysis of the data. This vision could soon become a reality through the EU project AquaINFRA, where IGB is an important contributor.

IGB researcher Lynn Govaert has been awarded funding under the Emmy Noether Programme. Her project will focus on the question whether we can predict species and community responses to environmental change based on the strength of the key interacting evolutionary and ecological processes.

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.

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.

As an international, science-based organisation, GEO AquaWatch is dedicated to the global observation of freshwater and marine systems. Since 2022, the organisation has been having a new node at IGB to drive the calibration and validation of satellite data. 

IGB has provided feedback on the government draft of the National Water Strategy, emphasising, among other things, the relevance of aquatic biodiversity and the large practical implementation deficit in water management.