News

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.

Dörthe Tetzlaff's team combined a mathematical model with field data to analyse the pathways of nitrate in the Demnitzer Mühlenfließ - a typical catchment in the north-eastern German lowlands with mixed landscape use.

Aquatic ecosystems suffer disproportionately from anthropogenic pressure and the effects of climate change. According to the EU Water Framework Directive, lakes along river systems in particular are currently in poor ecological condition. How similar are lakes that are more or less strongly connected by rivers and how do algal blooms spread along lake chains? These and other questions are being investigated by an IGB research team led by Stella Berger and Sabine Wollrab together with other partners from remote sensing and landscape ecology.

Ulrike Berninger, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salzburg in Austria, has long been interested in mixotrophic plankton. This refers to the small organisms floating in water that combine the properties of both zooplankton and phytoplankton. Depending on the environmental situation or individual requirements, these unicellular organisms can either take up food particles via phagocytosis or carry out photosynthesis using sunlight.

Fish are an important element in the food web of lakes. This also applies to the experimental enclosures of the LakeLab. However, in this case, the number of fish must be controlled so that the results from the individual cylinders can be compared with each other. Because fish from the lake repeatedly jump into the enclosures, all fish must first be removed with nets from the cylinders before starting a new experiment. Today, 5 small perch were released into each enclosure for this year's LakeLab experiment.