Being one of the few female forestry engineers at CREAF and having come from environmental consultancy and hydraulic modelling gives Diana Pascual a unique profile. Hers is a trajectory of courageous decisions often taken based on intuition, such as getting involved in research projects from a professional profile markedly oriented towards the knowledge transfer.

These days we are shocked by the floods caused by the DANA in Valencia, Castilla la Mancha, Murcia and Andalusia, among other regions. A DANA - the acronym for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos - is a common meteorological phenomenon in the Mediterranean, also known as a cold drop, but now it is becoming much more virulent due to climate change and we are already seeing the serious consequences.

On the island of El Hierro, in the Canary Islands, water is a scarce commodity, and its inhabitants have had to manage to get it throughout history. One of the oldest ways was the Garoé tree (Ocotea foetens) which, like other trees that live surrounded by fog and humidity, traps the small droplets of water, so people stored the drops that fell from the leaves in a well.

Dr. Laia Pellejà, the new director of the Institution of Research Centres of Catalonia (CERCA), visited CREAF as part of her institutional tour of Catalan research centers. During the visit, Pellejà met with the CREAF management team, who presented their most important projects and recent achievements in research management. 

Every lake is a miniature universe: it is a space with its own temperature and salinity, in which particular flora and fauna live and certain microorganisms develop. Thanks to their diverse nature, lakes make the ecosystems to which they belong more resilient and provide society with numerous benefits, such as water cycle regulation. However, lakes are also the backdrop to many human activities and are severely exposed to global warming.