News

IGB scientist Dr Oleksandra Shumilova was honored with the Caroline von Humboldt Award today. The award, which is endowed with 15,000 euros, is given annually to an excellent female postdoctoral researcher from Germany or abroad as a distinction for her scientific achievements and successes to date and serves to support a research stay at HU Berlin.

A research team from IGB has analysed the zooplankton communities in the White Nile and Blue Nil in Khartoum. It is the first study of plankton in the Sudan Nile since the 1980s and provides an important baseline for monitoring of the river‘s biodiversity in the face of ongoing hydropower dam construction.

A new IGB dossier describes the changes in Brandenburg's landscape water balance and outlines options for action in agriculture, forestry and water management.

Accurately detecting microplastic particles poses major challenges for researchers from various disciplines. A team of environmental scientists has described the methodological difficulties in the journal Nature Medicine and calls for more standardized methods in biomonitoring.

Dagmar Frisch heads the new IGB research group "Evolutionary Ecology and Global Change". We asked her three questions: one about her work, one personal and one to allow her creativity to flourish.

In a joint interview, two artists and two researchers discuss why war never really ends, how rivers become 'witnesses' and 'victims', and the universal aspects of individual rivers' fates. These perspectives have been incorporated into the art & science project 'PEACES so far', which will be on display at Berlin Science Week 2025.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has released its inaugural Green Status assessment for the gharial, classifying the species as "Critically Depleted" numbers-wise and habitats-wise, across its former range. One of the co-authors of the expert assessment is Dr Phoebe Griffith from IGB.

A study  of the physical characteristics of the Aral Sea shows continuous mixing of the water layers, which supplies the upper layers with nutrients and the bottom of the lake with oxygen. However, even small changes in water level or transparency (e.g. due to increased algal production) can bring the lake out of balance.