Publications by authors named "Nicola Fohrer"

Cities suffering water scarcity are projected to increase in the following decades. However, the application of standardized indicator frameworks for assessing urban water resource management problems is on an early stage. India is expected to have the highest urban population facing water scarcity in the world by 2050.

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Article Synopsis
  • The Danjiangkou Reservoir is essential for the South-to-North Water Diversion Project and hosts a diverse community of bacterioplankton, but little is known about its nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.
  • This study used metagenomics to analyze how bacterioplankton communities vary across different depths in the reservoir and identified key factors influencing their composition, such as temperature and dissolved oxygen.
  • Results showed that specific genes related to nitrogen and phosphorus cycles were more abundant in surface and bottom layers compared to the middle layer, with Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Planctomycetes being dominant groups.
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Pesticides are detected in surface water and groundwater, endangering the environment. In lowland regions with subsurface drainage systems, drained depressions become hotspots for transport of pesticides and their transformation products (TPs). This study focuses on detailed modelling of the degradation and transport of pesticides with different physico-chemical properties.

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Despite over two decades since the EU Water Framework Directive have passed, achieving the desired water quality in German surface waters remains challenging, regardless of efforts to reduce phosphorus inputs and associated environmental impacts. This study aims at analyzing the characteristics governing the concentrations of four key water quality parameters (total phosphorus, orthophosphate, particulate phosphate, and suspended solids) in two lowland catchments: the 50 km catchment of the Kielstau, Germany, and its 7 km tributary, the Moorau, which are dominated by agricultural land use. To this end, different sampling methods, particularly high-resolution precipitation event-based sampling and daily mixed samples, are conducted and evaluated, and their effectiveness is compared.

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Herbicides are important, ubiquitous environmental contaminants, but little is known about their interaction with bacterial aquatic communities. Here, we sampled a protected natural freshwater habitat and characterised its microbiome in interaction with herbicides. We evolved the freshwater microbiomes in a microcosm assay of exposure (28 days) to flufenacet and metazachlor at environmental concentrations of 0.

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There is a common scientific understanding that global change impact analysis, mitigation, and adaptation require interdisciplinary work. Integrated modeling could help to address the challenges associated with the impacts of global change. Particularly, integrated modeling that takes feedback effects into account will allow for the derivation of climate resilient land use and land management.

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Water is an indispensable resource for human being and the environment. This study analyses spatial distribution of water reservoirs in the Sota catchment with regards to livestock density, population density, rainfall distribution and geological structure of the Sota catchment, and assessed the state of these reservoirs. To this end, the geographic coordinates of water reservoirs were collected and the updated database of reservoirs census in Benin, was used.

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In order to study the vertical distribution characteristics of phytoplankton in the Danjiangkou Reservoir, the water source of the Middle Route Project of the South-North Water Diversion, seven sampling sites were set up in the Reservoir for quarterly sampling from 2017 to 2019, and water environment surveys were conducted simultaneously. The results showed that 157 species (including varieties) were identified, belonging to 9 phyla and 88 genera. In terms of species richness, Chlorophyta had the largest number of species, accounting for 39.

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Our capacity to predict trajectories of ecosystem degradation and recovery is limited, especially when impairments are caused by multiple stressors. Recovery may be fast or slow and either complete or partial, sometimes result in novel ecosystem states or even fail completely. Here, we introduce the Asymmetric Response Concept (ARC) that provides a basis for exploring and predicting the pace and magnitude of ecological responses to, and release from, multiple stressors.

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Freshwater resources as a key aspect of socio-economic development, provide a large number of services in human and environmental systems. Nevertheless, human appropriation of these water resources and the modification of landscapes lead to potential threats on water availability and quality from local to global scales. The Inle Lake in Myanmar is an economically, traditionally, and ecologically important freshwater ecosystem that faced severe degradation from the 2000s.

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Water quality and scarcity are among the most severe problems humans have been facing in the last decades. India, as a fast-developing country, is not an exception. The surface water quality has deteriorated due to anthropogenic activities.

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The transport of nutrients into water bodies is one of the main causes of water eutrophication. It is therefore important to estimate the loads of nutrients. Discharge and nutrient concentrations are the fundamental elements to estimate the loads of nutrients, the latter can be affected by sampling strategies.

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Land use and climate dynamics have a pronounced impact on water resources, biodiversity, land degradation, and productivity at all scales. Thus, in this study, we present the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use change and climate aiming to provide a scientific evidence about gains and losses in major land use categories and associated drivers and significancy and homogeneity of climate change. To this end, Landsat images and historical climate data have been used to determine the dynamics.

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Given the many threats to freshwater biodiversity, we need to be able to resolve which of the multiple stressors present in rivers are most important in driving change. Phytoplankton are a key component of the aquatic ecosystem, their abundance, species richness and functional richness are important indicators of ecosystem health. In this study, spatial variables, physiochemical conditions, water flow alterations and land use patterns were considered as the joint stressors from a lowland rural catchment.

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The sustainability of existing water resources is influenced by extreme streamflow, and climate variability and human activities are generally the major factors controlling these dynamics. However, most of previously proposed methods to determine the effects of these factors have only been developed under the assumption of stationarity. Therefore, to overcome the existing research gap, an innovative method was proposed in this study to analyze and distinguish the effects of climate variability and human activities on extreme streamflow based on the non-stationarity theory.

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Drainage ponds have the potential to serve as long-term interface measures primarily for flood control, and mass retention. They are often considered as promising supplements for the mitigation of drainage pipe loads to improve the water quality in agricultural landscapes. In this study, a highly dynamic drainage pond system with non-steady inflows and groundwater interaction was modified and investigated regarding its potential for pesticide and transformation product (TP) retention.

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The Middle Route Project of the South-to-North Water Diversion is an artificially independent system that does not connect to other surface waters. Excessive periphyton proliferation causes a series of environmental problems in the canal. In this study, the periphyton community and environmental factors on the left and right banks of the canal in the algal growing area were investigated and sampled six times (June, September, and November of 2019 and 2020).

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Agrochemicals are the main pollutants in freshwater ecosystems. Metazachlor and flufenacet are two common herbicides applied in fall (i.e.

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Lentic small water bodies (LSWB) are a highly valuable landscape element with important ecosystem services and benefits for humans and the environment. However, data about their pesticide contamination dynamic and the associated ecotoxicological effects are scarce. To overcome these knowledge gaps, five LSWBs located in agricultural fields in Northern Germany were studied during the spring pesticide application period (April to July 2018) and the concentrations of 94 pesticides were measured in weekly intervals.

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With the growing demand of assessing the ecological status, there is the need to fully understand the relationship between the planktic diversity and the environmental factors. Species richness and Shannon index have been widely used to describe the biodiversity of a community. Besides, we introduced the first ordination value from non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) as a new index to represent the community similarity variance.

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Since 2011, Myanmar has undergone a more rapid socio-economic development, which may substantially have affected land use and land cover (LULC) and water resources. This study investigates the changes in land and water resources of the Chindwin River catchment (114,686.9 km) in Myanmar over a twenty-year timespan from 1999 to 2019.

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As a representative of second-generation bioenergy plants, has received increasing attention in the studies of heavy metal (HM)-contaminated soil remediation. Currently, few studies have examined the effects of using to remediate HM-contaminated soils on the composition and function of microbial communities. In this study, the cultivar was examined for its tolerance and enrichment abilities when grown in soils containing 100 mg ·kg of cadmium (Cd).

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The research of the environmental fate of pesticides has demonstrated that applied compounds are altered in their molecular structure over time and are distributed within the environment. To assess the risk for contamination by transformation products (TP) of the herbicides flufenacet and metazachlor, the following four water body types were sampled in a small-scale catchment of 50 km in 2015/2016: tile drainage water, stream water, shallow groundwater, and drinking water of private wells. The TP were omnipresent in every type of water body, more frequently and in concentrations up to 10 times higher than their parent compounds.

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Agrochemicals such as pesticides and nutrients are concurrent chemical stressors in freshwater aquatic ecosystems surrounded by agricultural areas. Lentic small water bodies (LSWB) are ecologically significant habitats especially for maintaining biodiversity but highly understudied. Phytoplankton are ideal indicator species for stress responses.

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The frequent detection of residues from pesticides in various natural water types has raised public awareness. This study investigated the pesticide transformation in soil and their loss to shallow groundwater in a small agricultural catchment in Northern Germany. The pesticide Flufenacet and its transformation product Flufenacet ESA were examined in Luvisol and Colluvic Gleyosol under field conditions during two consecutive years.

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