In July started the cross-border coordination of ecological monitoring activities in the NATURA 2000 areas Neusiedler See and Hanság. In the course of this Interreg-EU-project WCL researcher Zsófia Horváth investigates soda pans.
Martin Kvarda wrote his master thesis under the title "Effect of floodplain restoration measures controlling hydrological connectivity on water quality and nutrient retention" under the supervision of Thomas Hein. In July he successfully finished his studies.
A new 3-year FWF project of Martin Kainz started in June under the title "Trophic pathways of omega-3 fatty acids in stream food". Results of this project will shed considerable light on the long-standing question of how consumers in headwater streams, but also in lowland streams, manage or fail to obtain essential nutrients and high quality forms of energy.
With her project "Competition and top-down control as potential factors controlling microbial diversity in aquatic networks" Katharina Besemer got the first PostDoc Fellowship of WasserCluster Lunz. In June she started with her work in our research center, where she will do research for two years.
In our new project Wasser:KRAFT scientists from WasserCluster and Bioenergy 2020+, EVN and Hydro-Connect work togehter with children end students from kindergarten to secondary school, to give them an understanding of how important the resource water is.
We are very sad that our friend, colleague, and supporter, Professor Brian Moss, former president of the International Society for Limnology, passed away on May 27. We would like to send our deepest sympathy to his wife Joyce and their daughter Angharad. We remember Brian as a very thoughtful and passionate limnologist, writer, thinker, and above all a person of encouragement who, always together with his friends and colleagues, supported our research station. Thank you very much, Brian, for your support that we appreciate a lot!
The team of WasserCluster Lunz, Austria
From May 9th to 16th WasserCluster working group leader Martin Kainz was as guest lecturer at Tongji University, Shanghai. The objective of his intensive course was aquatic food webs and ecotoxicology, topics which were very appreciated by the chinese students.
Extreme weather events can have a remarkable influence on aquatic ecosystems, because they can import huge amounts of terrestrial dissolved organic matter (tDOM) and reset the vegetation. In Taiwan these landslides scars are often inhabited by bamboos, which have better abilities in root competition and reproduction. With the expansion of bamboo, consequently an increase in bamboo A level horizon soil (BAS) can be expected, which is different from evergreen broad-leaved A soil horizon (EAS) in the nutrient and carbon content.
Kathrin Krennmayr wrote - under the supervision of Thomas Hein - her master thesis about this topic. The goal of the master thesis was to see whether the distinct tDOM pools result in different rates of microbial degradation in aquatic systems. In May Kathrin Krennmayr successfully finished her thesis.