The 44th annual meeting of the working group of hydrology, organized by Mr. Peter Chifflard, was held on November 2012, 15-17, at the WasserCluster in Lunz am See. More than 40 participants of Germany, Austria, India, China and Peru attended the conference and presented a lot of very interesting lectures and posters which show a broad variety of water related scientific fields of work. Finally heartily and warmly thanks will be given to the Gouvernement of Lower Austria, municipality Lunz am See, Autohaus Lunz, Raiffeisenbank Region Eisenwurzen, Fachgemeinschaft Hydrologische Wissenschaften, WasserCluster Lunz and Unimarkt Lunz for the financial support. (klick on photo to enlarge)
I am originally from the country music capital of the world, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. I completed my BSc in biology at Middle Tennessee State University, and moved north to complete my MSc and PhD at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. I am interested in how aquatic animals cope with temperature-driven variability in food quantity and quality. Most of my research to date has focused on Arctic marine food webs and on the ecology of Greenland sharks, which are the only shark to inhabit ice-covered North Atlantic seas. I am excited to be working at WasserCluster, and to begin exploring how temperature affects freshwater animals living in Lake Lunz!
Bernadette Teufl successfully defended her MSc-thesis " Effects of bank and channel morphology on the sediment quality of agricultural first-order streams".
We congratulate Bernadette and wish the best for her future time.
Glaciers store organic matter, which is released to alpine streams by glacial melt. In the light of global warming and disappearing glaciers worldwide, a team of limnologists around Tom Battin set out to explore the organic matter from 30 glaciers distributed throughout the Austrian Alps. In Nature Geoscience, Gabriel Singer, Christina Fasching and colleagues report about the unexpectedly high molecular diversity of organic matter stored in European glaciers and the contribution of this highly bioavailable organic carbon pool to microbial metabolism in downstream lotic ecosystems.
The PhD thesis of Nina Welti was selected by the Austrian newspaper "Presse" as PhD thesis of the week. The title of her thesis is "Nitrogen cycling in restored and disturbed riverine floodplains". In her thesis Nina Welti demonstrated how floodplain restoration alters the nitrate removal pathways and ultimately N2O and N2 emission. The thesis is based on field work, experimental approaches and an integrated model showing hot spots of denitrification in floodplains. The results of her research are presented in 4 international scientific publications.
The annual expert meeting with the topic "Insects and Climate Change" of the Entomological Society of Austria will take place at WasserCluster Lunz on October 13th.
The Austrian Federal Ministry for Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management recently funded the research project "FISK". Scientists around the research group of Martin Kainz (LIPTOX) will investigate how lipids of Arctic charr are affected by alternative fish feeds.