In June 2021, Elena Adams successfully defended her Ph.D. on pesticide effects on German amphibians and consequences for their risk assessment in the European Union.
Continue readingKnowledge Systems – Education about Ecosystem Services
This blogpost presents the subproject Knowledge Systems of the INTERRG project ecoserv, which deals with the knowledge transfer and communication of ecosystem services to pupils.
Continue readingChemical Monitoring Scheme for Surface Water Bodies in The Gambia
Lamin Jaiteh talks about his MSc thesis in which he planned and organized a national surface water monitoring scheme for his home country The Gambia, West Africa, where it is intended to be implemented to improve water quality and protect natural resources.
Continue readingVaccine 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.
Continue readingWater and Climate Regulation: the self-purification of streams
This article presents the subproject Water and Climate Regulation of the INTERREG project ecoserv. The subproject further researches the self-purification potential of streams.
Continue readingHow can ecosystem services be preserved and improved?
The INTERREG project ecoserv investigated the ecosystem services of protected areas and adjacent regions over a period of three years, and developed tools and strategies to maintain and improve them in the long term.
Continue readingPesticides threaten vulnerable invertebrates in streams
In this post, Matthias Liess (UFZ) and Verena Schreiner share the highlights of their recently published paper entitled “Pesticides are the dominant stressors for vulnerable insects in lowland streams”.
Continue readingVerena Gerstle wins SETAC Europe Best Poster Award!
Verena Gerstle, PhD student at the Institute for Environmental Sciences in Landau, received the Young Scientist Award for Best Poster Presentation at the SETAC Europe 31st Annual Meeting.
Continue readingPlants 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.
Continue readingImpact 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.
Continue reading