Selected publications

The team investigated the aquatic biodiversity in ponds located in different land-use types embedded in an agricultural area. Intensive agriculture erased most differences in aquatic biodiversity between grasslands, forests, and arable fields across all species from microbes to large organisms. Sediments, serveing as a biodiversity archive, reveal that such differences occured in the area.

This study presents a novel model approach for diffusive fluxes of dissolved gases, nutrients, and solutes from concentration profiles measured across the substrate-water interfaces using microsensors. The model offers a robust computational scheme for automatized determination of the interface position and enables precise calculations of the interfacial diffusive fluxes simultaneously. 

The study wanted to determine whether detritivore diversity enhances leaf litter decomposition in streams and how patterns vary across realms, biomes and climates. It indicates a positive relationship between detritivore diversity and decomposition rate particularly in the tropics, whereas at higher latitudes decomposition rate was more strongly correlated with detritivore abundance and biomass.

The authors identified limitations to the development of multiple-stressor management strategies and address these within an empirical framework. They give recommendations for the use of empirical models and experiments to predict the effects of freshwater degradation in response to changes in multiple stressors and offer practical advice for management strategies in 3 multiple-stressor scenarios.

The paper reports impacts of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and ionic silver (Ag+) on an aquatic processing chain of leaves, microbes, shredders and collectors. AgNPs and Ag+ affect multiple links of the processing chain at environmentally realistic concentrations. Shredders respond more sensitively than collectors. Leaf-associated fungal biomass and microbial leaf decomposition are being reduced.

The authors present the skyglow illumination system for IGB’s LakeLab, a large-scale enclosure research facility in Lake Stechlin. This is the first experimental setup to mimic skyglow realistically at ecosystem scale. Light propagation was modeled using photonics tools, a method adaptable to other outdoor and indoor experiments, urgently needed to understand the impact of skyglow on ecosystems.

The authors combined current literature with three novel case studies – one of them Lake Stechlin -  to develop the Lake Ice Continuum Concept to understand how key aspects of the physical, chemical, and ecological structure and function of lakes vary along a continuum of energy inputs mediated by winter climate. This framework is useful for predicting how lakes respond to climate change.

The authors investigated how ongoning changes in winter conditions may have consequences for annual phytoplankton biomass and production. They showed that earlier winter/spring runoff and snowmelt during warmer winters lead to lower summer chlorophyll-a in 41 north temperate lakes in Europe and North America.