Partially managing rivers to make them cleaner only by reducing the amount of phosphorus and phytoplankton, can entail undesirable changes throughout the ecosystem due to a nutrient imbalance. This is the main result of a study by researchers Carles Ibáñez at IRTA and Josep Peñuelas, CSIC researcher at CREAF, which was published by Science.
Research led by two French institutions shows that farmland comprising small fields sown with different types of crops is conducive to plant and animal diversity. Promoting such landscapes would help make up for the loss of natural and semi-natural habitats between crops.
A study just published in the scientific journal Nature Communications presents worrying results on animals’ adaptation to climate change. It concludes that while species are changing some aspects of their lives in response to global warming, they are not doing so quickly enough and do not always make the right changes.
We invite you to read the CREAF Annual Report 2018, so you can keep informed about all our progress. During that year, we published 239 articles indexed on SCI. 80% of this articles were in scientific magazines located in the first quartile.
The CREAF Board of Trustees has approved the adherence to the CERCA code of conduct in its meeting held on this July.
A CREAF-led European study published in the journal Global Change Biology warns that the drought associated with climate change could reduce soil fauna diversity and slow the decomposition of leaf litter (fallen leaves, twigs, bark, etc.), potentially hindering the recycling of nutrients for plants throughout Europe.
For Ramon Margalef, in the centenary of his birth.
Why do not we find ecosystems in the atmosphere, as in oceans and continents? In the atmosphere, spores, pollen grains and micro-organisms float, most of them expelled from soils. But trophic networks are not established, nor are there large flows of energy and matter controlled by living beings.
This is reflected in data from bird and butterfly monitoring programmes that have been running in Catalonia for 17 and 25 years respectively. Drought affects bird and butterfly populations differently, with butterfly species from arid areas and bird species from humid areas undergoing the greatest declines.
