Cleaning of ditches to maintain an adequate water table is a common practice in peatland forestry. Ditch maintenance promotes forest growth by keeping the water table at favourable level but as a negative side effect it increases nutrient and sediment loads to waterways. In Finland, scientists have examined the trade-off between increased harvest revenues and declined water quality due to

Researchers at the University of Oulu and the Finnish Environment Institute have addressed the question on how diatoms in rivers respond to different nutrient conditions. Interestingly, they found that high concentrations of dissolved inorganic nitrogen seem to reduce the species variability, probably because sensitive taxa disappear, while certain tolerant taxa can survive. Phosphorus is traditionally believed to be the limiting

We are proud to announce that Bart Immerzeel (NMBU, Norway) defended his thesis successfully on 24 September 2021, and he is thereby the third Biowater PhD student to achieve his degree. Bart has studied how societal benefits of catchment ecosystems may change under a green shift. A transition to bioeconomy can change the land cover and management systems of Nordic

There is increasing evidence that forested riparian corridors improve the ecological status of freshwaters, but this Finnish study takes one step further and looks at the effect on a national scale. The scientists used data from more than 900 river water bodies in Finland. They found that the ecology of small to medium sized rivers in an agricultural landscape benefitted

All that are working with the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) are familiar with the quality elements used as indicators to assess the ecological status of water bodies. But does that mean that we know what the best indicators are? In a new paper, Finnish BIOWATER colleagues have tested the use of fungi as indicators of ecological status. Fungi are

BIOWATER is proud to announce that our former PhD student, now post doc, Mette Vodder Carstensen, is one of five talented researchers that received Aarhus University Research Foundation’s PhD Award for 2020. We can only say, well deserved, Mette! The assessment criteria of the Aarhus University PhD programme include the excellent quality of the thesis and the general efforts of

Can trees along agricultural headwater streams improve the aquatic ecology and habitat quality? This question was asked by four scientists from Finnish and Canadian institutes. And their answer is: Yes, they can! The authors set out to study the effects on ecology of riparian land use. To do this, they studied 11 paired forested and open agricultural headwater stream reaches.

As pointed out earlier in our BIOWATER pages, there is a lack of systematic data on the impacts of forestry on water resources. We are therefore proud to present the work of PhD student Maria Rajakallio (University of Oulu, Finland) and her co-authors: They recently published new data on how forestry and drainage may impact aquatic ecology in a paper

Brownification of waters is a threat to aquatic ecosystems over large areas in Europe. A new paper links increasing concentrations of dissolved organic carbon to climate, deposition, and land-use, and the complex interactions between them. The authors studied 12 small forested headwater catchments in Finland, with monitoring records from 1990 to 2019. The catchments had a large gradient of climate