The latest news from Eawag

The Swiss fisheries advisory office (FIBER) promotes sustainable fisheries through advice and training. It now has a location in French-speaking Switzerland.

Combined sewer overflows following heavy rainfall could be avoided through the use of Blue-Green Infrastructure, such as infiltration basins, retention ponds, and porous pavements.

Members of Eawag's Sandec Department helped organise and participated in the recent Water for Impact (TU Delft) x Eawag Sandec Exchange Day. The aim of the Exchange Day was to enhance mutual understanding of each group’s work, facilitate knowledge exchange, and initiate collaborative efforts for future projects and research.

Aquatic invertebrates are used as bioindicators to evaluate the quality of Swiss watercourses. However, climate change is also leading to changes in the species composition of these organisms. Eawag has now investigated the impacts of increasing temperatures on water body evaluations on behalf of the FOEN. The findings: the indicators are expected to remain relevant at least for the coming decades.

A new study led by the Food Packaging Forum provides an overview of chemicals from food contact materials that are present in humans. This research reveals the extent to which chemicals used in food packaging and other food contact articles have been found in human bodies globally, and further highlights significant gaps in Biomonitoring and Toxicity data.

Last week, the 11th International Steven Hoogendijk Award (ISHA) of the “Batavian Society of Experimental Philosophy” was awarded to Eawag researcher and fresh Head of Department Linda Strande.

Last Saturday, numerous visitors flocked to the Eawag and Empa campus in Dübendorf for the Open Day of the two research institutes. Around the Eawag main building, our researchers gave insights into their daily work and at the same time provided information on the pressing issues surrounding water.

Lenny Winkel (*1975), currently Associate Professor at ETH Zurich and Group Leader at the aquatic research institute Eawag, has been appointed as Full Professor of Environmental Inorganic Geochemistry in the Department of Environmental Systems Science by the ETH Board.

For the protection of biodiversity, it is crucial to know the reference genome for as many species as possible.

Biodiversity is not a political programme: Only just 1.6 % of all documents searched at federal level make reference to the term. This is one of the many results that the WSL and Eawag institutes have compiled in the joint research initiative ‘Blue-Green Biodiversity’ and which are being presented today at the Special Info Day to an expert audience from administration, politics, research and practice.

Microorganisms in biofilms in rivers can break down harmful substances. Some are also able to degrade biocides, including the insect repellent diethyltoluamide (DEET) - or so it is thought. Researchers at the aquatic research institute Eawag have now discovered that DEET is degraded better when the proportion of treated wastewater in the water is high. They attribute this to specific enzymes that occur primarily where wastewater treatment plants return the water to the aquatic environment. However, the enzymes involved are not straightforward to predict.

Methane-oxidizing bacteria could play a greater role than previously thought in preventing the release of climate-damaging methane from lakes.

More than half of the global population were estimated to lack safely managed drinking water services in a recent study lead by Eawag researchers. This is shown in a global map that researchers compiled using machine learning based on data from household surveys and data derived from Earth observations.

Cities need to become more sustainable and use their water resources more efficiently. Managing water in small-scale cycles is one possible solution. A new white paper shows how this can be achieved.

With a 3D view through the fishoscope, fish in the Rhine Fall basin can be experienced up close. Eawag has accompanied the pilot project.

Researchers at Eawag and the Swiss Data Science Center have trained AI algorithms with a comprehensive ecotoxicological dataset.