Selected publications

The authors assessed the invasion dynamics of the New Zealand mud snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum, one of the most damaging freshwater invaders. They observed that the snail abundance increased through time with 59% of populations following the proposed pattern, providing insights into large-scale invasion dynamics to inform management actions to mitigate impacts on ecosystems and economies.

The authors analysed several hundred proteins of a broad diversity of fungal species in order to untangle the early diversification of fungi. Thorough curation of the phylogenomic data set and usage of cutting-edge methods enabled them to resolve long-standing contested relationships among different phyla.

First study on the fungal diversity in Antarctic benthic habitats along a salinity gradient to determine the co-occurrence of fungal parasites with their algal hosts dominated by benthic diatoms. Ascomycota and Chytridiomycota are the most abundant fungal taxa. Salinity shapes the fungal and the whole eukaryotic community composition, whereby fungal diversity increases with decreasing salinity.

Researchers from 90 scientific institutions worldwide have stated that freshwater biodiversity research and conservation lag far behind the efforts  in terrestrial and marine environments. They propose a research agenda with 15 priorities aimed at improving research on biodiversity in lakes, rivers, ponds and wetlands. This is urgently needed as the loss of biodiversity there is dramatic.

The authors experimentally quantified ecological and evolutionary contributions to total phytoplankton community change in response to elevated CO2 concentrations. They show a novel experimental approach to study ecological and evolutionary contributions to community features, and observed a decline in phytoplankton abundance to elevated CO2 that could be mainly explained by ecological changes. 

The study demonstrates that parasitic fungi profoundly modify microbial interactions through several mechanisms (e.g., stimulating bacterial colonization on phytoplankton cells, altering the community composition of bacteria). Hence, fungal microparasites can substantially shape the microbially mediated carbon flow at the base of aquatic food webs which we termed "fungal shunt" . 

In this conceptual paper, the authors argue that micro- and macro-algae represent an underappreciated, yet, important pathway for transporting microplastics and associated pollutants via marine food webs to humans, facilitating potential invasion of pathogens into the human body. For the assessment of human health risks, interactions between microplastics and algae need to be explored.

This study presents a novel model approach for diffusive fluxes of dissolved gases, nutrients, and solutes from concentration profiles measured across the substrate-water interfaces using microsensors. The model offers a robust computational scheme for automatized determination of the interface position and enables precise calculations of the interfacial diffusive fluxes simultaneously.