In this blogpost, Moritz Link reports how pesticide toxicity affects stream ecosystems in Transylvania, Romania, a region where traditional agriculture prevails. The researchers analyzed macroinvertebrate communities, leaf litter decomposition and parasite prevalence in relation to physico-chemical stressors in the stream and the landscape.
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Interest in microplastic contamination in Antarctica is very recent. For this reason, researchers from University of Koblenz – Landau (Germany) and Universidad de Concepcion (Chile) decided to find out a little more about what is happening in the land of the penguins.
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The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is looking for an intern to work on water quality and chemical policy issues within the Water Team of the Environment Directorate. The position starts in September 2022 in Paris.
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Each year, several students of the Environmental Pollution Management (Ecotoxicology) Program complete an 8-week internship period in their 2nd semester. This internship is abbreviated as “AMEO” which translates to “Applied Module at External Organizations”. The AMEO is performed either at an external university, governmental or industrial research institute where students learn to apply the competences achieved during their study. Students use this opportunity to not only travel and explore Germany, but some of them even decide to gather experiences from around the world. In this blogpost, Emma Yenney shares her AMEO experience in VLIZ, Belgium. Read along…..
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In May 2022, a couple of M.Sc. Ecotoxicology students along with Carsten Brühl went to South Tyrol (Italy) to investigate the distribution of pesticides in alpine environments. A part of the group were students from the module Methods in Ecotoxicology, that includes a block lecture and a laboratory test and this year also a field part to perform exposure measurements. The Landau group met with Johann Zaller from BOKU Vienna, author of Daily Poison.
In this blogpost, two of those students, Ken Mauser and Nina Engelhard, present the reason for going to South Tyrol, some brief details about the study and their experience.
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How climate change will alter the effects of toxicants is a key concern in the 21st Century. Rising water temperature can increase the toxicity of some contaminants to stream-dwelling animals in laboratory conditions, as has been shown for the most widely used insecticides in the world – the neonicotinoids. But until this study, whether this translates to more realistic environmental scenarios remained to be tested. In this blogpost, Sam Macaulay talks about his mesocosm experiment studying the effects of rising water temperatures and neonicotinoids on stream invertebrate communities.
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After a long wait of 2 years, the 32nd annual meeting of SETAC Europe was held in Denmark IN – PERSON! Researchers from all over the globe participated in the meeting; a handful of them from University of Koblenz – Landau. In this blogpost, Verena Gerstle, one of those representing our University at the 32nd SETAC conference recounts the group’s experience in her own words:
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In this blogpost, Francesco Polazzo talks about how pesticides can cause a drastic change in the organisation and strength of interactions of aquatic food webs. Particularly, after pesticide exposure, changes in the strength of trophic interactions seem to be driving long-lasting effects in community structure. When multiple pesticides act together, they modify both food web structure and interaction’s strength, causing late-stage non-additive effects between stressors.
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The University of Ghent in Belgium is offering 2 paid PhD positions in the field of ecotoxicology.
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In a recent publication from the Environmental and Soil Chemistry group, we present a method enabling us to detect anthropogenic TiO2 nanoparticles in soil despite the presence of a high natural background. The method relies of colloidal extraction and trace elements ratio using ICP-MS.
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