Vaccine Myth-Buster: Review cleans up with prejudices and dangerous misinformation

In this post, Paul Löffler, student in the MSc Ecotoxicology program at University of Koblenz-Landau, provides some background on the review paper on vaccine myths that he published in Frontiers in Immunology – Vaccines and Molecular Therapeutics.

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Plants and invertebrates face increasing applied pesticide toxicity

Increased efficacy of pesticides comes along with decreased applied amounts in agriculture – but does this translate to lower risks to non-target species? The answer is NO, if you ask scientists at the University of Koblenz-Landau who recently published a study in Science assessing changes in the use of 381 pesticides and toxicity to eight non-target species groups over the course of 25 years. In our blog, the authors explain the shifts in applied pesticide toxicity they found, and which species are increasingly at risk.

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Impact of fungicides on amphibian development & metamorphosis

In this post, Mirco Bundschuh and Carsten Brühl talk about a recent publication assessing the impact of fungicide-induced changes in food quality on the development and metamorphoses of the European common frog (Rana temopraria). This work is published open access in Ecology and Evolution. Relevant data is made available to the research community through dryad.

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Water Quality in European Surface Waters – A Spatial Complex (Part 3)

Jakob Wolfram talks about how water quality in Europe is affected by spatial factors and how they contribute to quality impairments for different organism groups. His research on “Water Quality and Ecological Risks in European Surface Waters – Monitoring Improves While Water Quality Decreases” is published in Environment International.

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