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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.

Alexander Sukhodolov has been carrying out a research on the Tagliamento River in the north-east of Italy for almost a decade and a half. Scientists are fascinated by this river because it has a number of features that makes it a unique object of study. IGB operates a River Lab at the Tagliamento, where researchers study river hydrodynamics and its effect and interactions with aquatic biota.

The quality of lake ice is of paramount importance for ice safety and lake ecology under ice, but its temporal and spatial variability is largely unknown. An international research team with IGB researcher Hans-Peter Grossart conducted a coordinated sampling campaign of lake ice quality throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The team, led by Sweden's Uppsala University, was able to show that lake ice during this period generally consisted of unstable white ice, which at times accounted for up to 100 percent of the total ice thickness.

A Chinese team, in collaboration with IGB researcher Sabine Hilt, has shown in a large mesocosm experiment how heat waves, nutrients and pesticides promote algae growth and cause aquatic plants to dwindle. This shift in plant types may increase the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions from shallow lakes, as Sabine Hilt and Dutch colleagues demonstrated in another mesocosm experiment.

Researchers from IGB have investigated which factors promote the formation of vivianite and thus increase the amount of recoverable phosphorus.