October 11, 2024Many fish species migrate back and forth between habitats in the course of their lives. However, man-made obstacles make life difficult for these species. Cold-loving fish are also affected by climate change, especially if access to cold-water zones is made more difficult. Renaturalisation can solve this problem. An Eawag project will now help to identify obstacles and remaining cold-water zones so that restoration measures can be planned in a more targeted manner.
October 11, 2024The Swiss fisheries advisory office (FIBER) promotes sustainable fisheries through advice and training. It now has a location in French-speaking Switzerland.
October 3, 2024Aquatic 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.
September 3, 2024Biodiversity 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.
August 22, 2024Microorganisms 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.
August 20, 2024Methane-oxidizing bacteria could play a greater role than previously thought in preventing the release of climate-damaging methane from lakes.
July 9, 2024Biodiversity is dwindling rapidly, while measures to protect it are lagging behind the targets. Only one thing can help: utilising scarce resources as efficiently as possible where they are most effective. The “Lanat-3” research project lays the foundation for this with the help of the latest data and AI-supported models.
July 9, 2024The VSA Water Quality Platform and Eawag have analysed the effects to date of the measures taken under the "Action Plan for Risk Reduction and Sustainable Use of Pesticides" on water quality. The number of limit value exceedances has decreased significantly since 2019. Nevertheless, many kilometres of rivers and streams are still contaminated. Pyrethroids pose a particularly high risk to watercourses.
June 13, 2024An Eawag project is investigating how borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) affects the surrounding soil, the groundwater and the microorganisms living in it.
