news 2024

Researchers describe topsoil as "death zone" for fresh grass in the fairy circle Namibia's legendary fairy circles are mysterious, circular, bald patches in the dry grasslands on the edge of the Namib Desert. Their formation has been researched for decades and has recently been the subject of much debate.

The images taken by US spy satellites since the late 1950s have long been classified. They became publicly accessible in the late 1990s and are used, among others, in climate research and archaeology. Researchers from the Conservation Biogeography Lab of the Institute of Geography at Humboldt-Universität led by Tobias Kümmerle also take interest in the black-and-white photographs.

Research team shows links between agricultural landscape structure and bird populations . The intensification of agriculture has its price: it makes landscapes structurally more uniform and thus contributes to the decline in biodiversity. How should agricultural landscapes be designed in order to promote biodiversity? A new study by researchers from the University of Göttingen, the Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA) e. V.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena and the TU Ilmenau have shown that plant observations collected using plant identification apps such as Flora Incognita can provide information about the developmental stages of plants - both on a small scale and across Europe. "The snowdrops have never bloomed as early as this year, have they?" Many people who walk through nature with their eyes open are sure to have asked themselves these or similar questions.

Research team investigates adaptation strategies from a forestry perspective . Climate change is altering our forests. Increased storms and drought have significant consequences for ecosystems and their sustainable use. Forests are important for wood production, carbon storage and local recreation, for example.

Fish are changing how they search for and consume prey in warmer waters, with models suggesting extinctions become more likely due to this behaviour change, according to a new study published in "Nature Climate Change" . Led by researchers at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the researchers found that fish in the Baltic Sea respond to temperature increases by consuming the first prey they encounter.

Scientific study on river habitats at the TUM Even modern and supposedly gentler hydropower plants cause considerable damage to river ecosystems. This is shown by a study by Prof. Jürgen Geist from the Chair of Aquatic Systems Biology at the TUM School of Life Sciences published in the "Journal of Applied Ecology".

Researchers develop new method for assessing climate change risks to ecosystems . Climate change is altering the earth's ecosystems. In order to assess the risks, studies often calculate the extent to which regions are exposed to climatic changes in order to determine the threat to ecosystems. This approach may lead to false conclusions, as it ignores how living organisms react physiologically when, for example, the water content of the soil or the carbon dioxide content of the air changes.

The tendency of communities and the species within them to become more similar or more distinct across landscapes - biotic homogenisation and differentiation - are approximately balanced, according to a new study published in ,,Science Advances". Led by researchers at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the researchers analysed 527 datasets collected from ecosystems like grasslands, shrublands, and coral reefs as far back as 500 years ago.

The conversion of rainforest into plantations erodes and restructures food webs and fundamentally changes the way these ecosystems function, according to a new study published in Nature. The findings provide the first insights into the processing of energy across soil and canopy animal communities in mega-biodiverse tropical ecosystems.

Research team investigates effects of changing land use on ecosystems in Sumatra . Every day, large areas of rainforest are converted into plantations. Biodiversity and the ecosystem are changing drastically as a result. However, knowledge about the consequences is patchy: previous studies have either focused on the diversity of species or the functioning of the ecosystem.

The evolution of sustainable institutions critically depends on clearly defined and enforced access rights Common pool resources comprise around 65 percent of Earth's surface and vast tracts of the ocean. While examples of successful governance of these resources exist, the circumstances and mechanisms behind their development have remained unclear.

Research team at Göttingen University develops environmentally friendly iron catalysis using light as an energy source A research team at the University of Göttingen has discovered an innovative strategy in chemical synthesis that combines iron-mediated carbon-hydrogen bond conversion with the concept of photocatalysis.

New study advocates the use of more than one million declassified images for ecology and conservation. A large number of historical spy-satellite photographs from the Cold War Era were declassified decades ago. This valuable remote sensing data has been utilised by scientists across a wide range of disciplines from archaeology to civil engineering.

Researchers investigate how individual characteristics and the design of food choice -nudges- influence support for their adoption You may not realise it, but -nudge- has been used by businesses, policy-makers and governments for years to prod the public into making different choices. Small changes in our environment can -nudge- us into different behaviours without restricting the options available to us.

Climate change poses a threat to yields and food security worldwide, with plant diseases as one of the main risks. An international team of researchers surrounding Prof. Senthold Asseng from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now shown that further spread of the fungal disease wheat blast could reduce global wheat production by 13% until 2050.

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results.

An economical process with green hydrogen can be used to extract CO2-free iron from the red mud generated in aluminium production The production of aluminium generates around 180 million tonnes of toxic red mud every year. Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, a centre for iron research, have now shown how green steel can be produced from aluminium production waste in a relatively simple way.

Research team led by Göttingen University investigates the emergence of multicellularity Of all the organisms that photosynthesize, land plants have the most complex bodies. How did this morphology emerge? A team of scientists led by the University of Göttingen has taken a deep dive into the evolutionary history of morphological complexity in streptophytes , which include land plants and many green algae.

Researchers from Heidelberg and Karlsruhe use stalagmite to reconstruct regional and global climate history When combined with data from tree-ring records, stalagmites can open up a unique archive to study natural climate fluctuations across hundreds of years, a research team including geoscientists from Heidelberg University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have demonstrated.