Current projects
Swiss National Assessment of Lake Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (SNALBES) - SNF NRP82
Lakes are central to Switzerland’s cultural identity and natural heritage. Yet there are no clear guidelines to assess their biodiversity, ecological status, or value to society.
The SNALBES project, funded by the SNF NRP82 program, seeks to transform how Switzerland studies and manages lake biodiversity. Together with local, cantonal and federal authorities, the team will develop methods to monitor biodiversity and carry out the first nationwide assessment of more than 200 lakes. These lakes will cover the full spectrum of human influence, from pristine alpine waters to those heavily affected by warming, intensive farming, urbanisation or invasive species such as the Quagga mussel.
The project will classify the ecological condition of the lakes, identify them as healthy or degraded, and analyse the drivers behind these outcomes. Based on this knowledge, the team will propose measures to restore lake health where needed. An economic survey will also determine how much the Swiss public is willing to invest in improving lake conditions.
SNALBES brings together natural and social scientists at Eawag with experts from the Federal Office for the Environment’s Water Division. The consortium also works with cantonal water authorities, NGOs and international networks. Through workshops and round tables, the project follows a co-creation process that integrates diverse knowledge, perspectives and priorities. This collaborative approach builds consensus and ensures that the methods and results are relevant and usable in practice. Findings will be communicated widely through a website, public events, fact sheets, reports and policy briefs.
Our project is co-led by Anita Narwani, Blake Matthews and Ivana Logar at Eawag, as well as Bänz Lundsgaard-Hansen and Yael Schindler of the Water Division of the Swiss Federal Office of the Environment.
Please reach out to me or our project coordinator (Nadine Fragnière) if you are interested in getting involved.
The SNALBES project, funded by the SNF NRP82 program, seeks to transform how Switzerland studies and manages lake biodiversity. Together with local, cantonal and federal authorities, the team will develop methods to monitor biodiversity and carry out the first nationwide assessment of more than 200 lakes. These lakes will cover the full spectrum of human influence, from pristine alpine waters to those heavily affected by warming, intensive farming, urbanisation or invasive species such as the Quagga mussel.
The project will classify the ecological condition of the lakes, identify them as healthy or degraded, and analyse the drivers behind these outcomes. Based on this knowledge, the team will propose measures to restore lake health where needed. An economic survey will also determine how much the Swiss public is willing to invest in improving lake conditions.
SNALBES brings together natural and social scientists at Eawag with experts from the Federal Office for the Environment’s Water Division. The consortium also works with cantonal water authorities, NGOs and international networks. Through workshops and round tables, the project follows a co-creation process that integrates diverse knowledge, perspectives and priorities. This collaborative approach builds consensus and ensures that the methods and results are relevant and usable in practice. Findings will be communicated widely through a website, public events, fact sheets, reports and policy briefs.
Our project is co-led by Anita Narwani, Blake Matthews and Ivana Logar at Eawag, as well as Bänz Lundsgaard-Hansen and Yael Schindler of the Water Division of the Swiss Federal Office of the Environment.
Please reach out to me or our project coordinator (Nadine Fragnière) if you are interested in getting involved.
The temperature dependence of competition in phytoplankton
The effects of warming on populations, communities and ecosystems are currently central topics of research in ecology and evolution, due to predicted climate change. However, warming will not occur in isolation to other types of abiotic environmental change. It is therefore important to consider how other gradients of environmental change may interact with warming. In aquatic environments, resource limitation and warming may increasingly occur together, because as waters warm they become increasingly stratified, preventing the mixing and resuspension of resources from the sediment. Resources and environmental temperature are both important drivers of metabolic processes, which have impacts across all scales of biological organization, from cells to ecosystems. The overarching goal of this project is to determine the extent to which warming alters essential resource requirements and elemental stoichiometry in freshwater phytoplankton, and in turn how such changes may influence competitive species interactions, community assembly and ecosystem functioning under warming. I aim to understand these impacts from a mechanistic perspective, addressing multiple levels of biological organization, from molecular to population, and community-level differences.
This project is funded by the SNSF for 4 years and will begin in the summer of 2021. Sarah Levasseur is the PhD student leading the ecological component of this project and Vanessa Weber de Melo is the postdoc leading the molecular and evolutionary work on the project.
This project is funded by the SNSF for 4 years and will begin in the summer of 2021. Sarah Levasseur is the PhD student leading the ecological component of this project and Vanessa Weber de Melo is the postdoc leading the molecular and evolutionary work on the project.