News

The IGB team around project leader Dr. Stella Berger has been waiting quite a while for cold temperatures. The scientists were ready to start the scheduled ice experiment at the LakeLab. 

The EU financed project AQUACOSM will offer more than 11,500 person-days of Transnational Access to more than 37 different European mesocosm facilities between January 2018 and December 2020.

In two studies, IGB scientists present new insights about the effects of summer storms on the ecosystem processes of pristine lakes.

Lakes, rivers, estuaries and oceans are closely connected. Despite this, aquatic research is still divided in marine and freshwater sciences. Now scientists from 19 leading research institutes and universities and two enterprises from 12 countries across Europe aim to change this and have joined forces in the project “AQUACOSM - Network of Leading European AQUAtic MesoCOSM Facilities Connecting Mountains to Oceans from the Arctic to the Mediterranean”. The network will perform the first systematic large-scale experiments in both freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Throughout the LakeLab experiment 2016 samples are regularly taken during day and night. For example, the team of IGB scientist Gabriel Singer gets out once a week shortly before dawn. They focus on aquatic bacteria which are responsible for the decomposition of organic material.

After returning from his postdoctoral residency at the University of Brisbane in Australia,  Andreas Jechow visited by chance the Lake Stechlin Information Center in 2012. There he saw a scale model of the LakeLab and was immediately fascinated by the research platform and the concept behind it. Now, three years later he is part of the LakeLab team and studies the light regimes in the mesocosms.