October 22, 2024Forest or farmland: The impact on amphipods in the groundwater is detectable, even if the groundwater extraction site is up to one kilometre away.
October 11, 2024The Swiss fisheries advisory office (FIBER) promotes sustainable fisheries through advice and training. It now has a location in French-speaking Switzerland.
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.
July 17, 2024Environmental chemist Joanna Houska has received an award for her doctoral thesis from the German Water Chemistry Society. She conducted her research at Eawag and EPFL, demonstrating both theoretically and experimentally how oxidative water treatment using ozone or chlorine can be more efficiently utilized when there is a precise understanding of the organic substances dissolved in the water to be treated.
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.
May 27, 2024The Lush Young Researcher Prize promotes research for a future free of animal testing. This year, the award goes to Eawag researcher Barbara Jozef.
May 21, 2024EPFL has teamed up with three organizations – the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the Association for the Safeguard of Lake Geneva (ASL) – to develop Lémanscope, a citizen-science initiative to monitor the health of Lake Geneva. Today the researchers are calling on volunteers to help collect essential data.
May 6, 2024A survey of 99 small Swiss streams reveals that the majority of the studied streams have significant deficits in their ecological condition and can only fulfil their function as a habitat for animals to a limited extent. Insect larvae and other small animals that react sensitively to pesticides are missing in over 70% of the streams examined. Statistical analyses indicate that these aquatic organisms are particularly impacted when the structure and morphology of the stream bed has been altered or if the proportion of agricultural land in the catchment area is high.
April 3, 2024Eawag and the Ecotox Centre welcome a total revision of the Plant Protection Products Ordinance (PPPO). However, the two institutes are calling for improvements on important points, such as the adoption of EU authorisations or the precautionary principle. The ordinance must ensure that other regulations such as the Water Protection or the Environmental Protection Act are not undermined.
