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Today, Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke visited the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin to learn about the first interim results of the special investigation programme on the environmental disaster in the Oder River (“ODER~SO”), which has been funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) since February 2023. Fish stocks in the Oder River have declined by 53 to 67 per cent as a result of last summer’s environmental disaster, especially midstream.

On 8 May 2023, around 2,000 juvenile fish will be stocked near Stützkow. The original plan was to release the fish in the autumn of 2022, but this was not possible due to the man-made environmental disaster on the river. Now, the partners involved are making a new attempt and sending a signal for better protection of our river habitats. 

Weirs and other transverse structures in rivers not only impede migratory fish on their way to spawning grounds, but even if they are able to pass, many of them die in the turbines of hydroelectric power plants. Traditional fish ladders are often not designed for sturgeon, and as a result on average only about 2 per cent of the sturgeon use them. A team of researchers from Germany and China has now presented a recommendation on how to facilitate effective passage and even promote sturgeon with bypass channels at dams that can serve as additional habitat.

Cyclists need light, bats need darkness - a new science-based approach can help.

How do animals and plants survive and thrive in cities? Urban ecology is a growing research field. To find orientation in the information jungle on urban ecology, a team led by IGB and Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin) has created a map of 62 important research hypotheses in urban ecology. Among them are the idea of the daring city dweller, life on credit or the biological monotony of cities. Research has yet to show how robust the hypotheses are and to which cities they apply. The overview provides an important basis for this endeavor. It is openly available in Wikidata.

A chronicle of an environmental disaster on the River Oder: Images of huge quantities of dead fish – covering all species and sizes – shocked the German, Polish and international public in August 2022. IGB researchers set about tracking down the causes. IGB was the first institution to determine that the disaster was definitely man-made.

An international team has set up a database with geo-referenced occurrence records of four groups of freshwater invertebrate taxa across Cuba. Detailed knowledge of the spatial distribution of freshwater species is an important basis for monitoring changes in aquatic ecosystems.

From water to air: we only know many flying insects as adults, but many of them have their first life stages in the water. The larvae of mayflies, for example, spend almost a year in the shallow shore zones of standing waters before they come ashore for a few days as adult flies. These so-called semi-aquatic insects are an important food source for animals in the water and on land and are used as bioindicators to assess water quality and the state of freshwater ecosystems.