Projects

Promotion of biodiversity and ecosystem services in small gravel pits through implementation of habitat-oriented management practices in recreational-fisheries management.

BIBS is a BMBF project for biodiversity data collection and synthesis in Germany

Climatic extremes, in particular storms and heat waves, are now becoming more frequent, a trend that has been linked to directional climate change and is projected to continue. The overarching aim of the MANTEL European Joint Doctoral (EJD) Training Network is to train a cohort of Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) to investigate the effects of the most extreme events, and more subtle lower magnitude episodic events, on lake and reservoir water quality.

Eutrophication is a worldwide environmental problem accelerated by global warming, affecting the stability of aquatic ecosystems and having long-lasting consequences. In this project we investigate if and how eutrophication affects two interacting evolutionary processes: disease spread and interspecific hybridization.

New scientific publications about the taxonomy of small suspended algae, called phytoplankton will be implemented into an update of the German taxa list. This update is needed to ensure uniform identification and coding of indicator species used for the assessment of the ecological status of lakes and rivers in Germany.

Woody riparian buffer strips along rivers have widely been used mainly to reduce nutrient and fine sediment input from agricultural areas but potentially offer many more ecosystem services (e.g. habitat provision increasing biodiversity, shading and temperature regulation, mitigating climate change effects).

Our aim is the investigation of regional, i.e. landscape-scale, mechanisms of carbon dissimilation in ‘fluvial metaecosystems’.

Water and energy are crucial to sustainable development, both globally and within Germany. WANDEL focuses on the question of whether limited water availability restricts the use of conventional energy systems and thereby accelerates the energy transition, or whether it actually slows the transition down.