Skitt fiske 2.0!  ‘Extreme Sticklebacking’ in Nordland

By Marijn Kuizenga A new summer means a new season for field work! This season we are embarking on a project which aims to characterize mercury contamination in freshwater lakes across Northern Norway and study its effects on three-spined stickleback populations. During the summer of 2022 we are studying sticklebacks from 21 lakes scattered throughout …

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Urbanization is driving evolution of plants globally

Here is a story of a monumental project we were lucky to be part of, and which was published today in Science. Read the full article here!   Humans re-shape the environments where they live, with cities being among the most profoundly transformed environments on Earth. New research now shows that these urban environments are altering …

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Rapid evolution in waterfleas yields new conservation insights

The extraordinary ability of animals to rapidly evolve in response to predators has been demonstrated via genetic sequencing of a waterflea population across nearly two decades. In a new study published in Nature Communications, together with scientists at the Universities of Birmingham in the UK, the KU Leuven in Belgium, and the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and …

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Predicting fish community responses to environmental policy targets

Happy to share some new policy-relevant findings, just published in Biodiversity and Conservation (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10531-021-02154-2)!  People working with aquatic biodiversity and habitat quality in Europe are probably familiar with the EU Water Framework Directive. The WFD proposes biological, hydromorphological, and physico-chemical habitat quality criteria that need to be achieved to reach or maintain a “good” or …

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G-BiKE: New European Network working on Genomic Biodiversity for Resilient Ecosystems

From September 4th to 6th 2019, Joost went to Sarajevo in Bosnia to attend the 2nd meeting of G-BiKE, a new European COST network focussing on Genomic Biodiversity Knowledge for Resilient Ecosystems. G-BiKE is a research network within the Horizon 2020 COST Programme to link scientists and practitioners across the EU and beyond, highlighting the …

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Stickleback and goby hunt in the charming Vesterålen

Student blog special by: Camela Haddad Wednesday 05/06/2019, at approximately noon, was the start of a great journey. After hours of driving, a short ferry trip and airport picking up, we all finally arrived to Vesterålen. The full team was constituted of Joost Raeymaekers, Thijs Bal, Jørgen Hetzler and myself (from Nord University, Bodø campus), …

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Eco-evolutionary dynamics across scales

Eco-evolutionary dynamics are mechanisms in nature that occur when ecological and evolutionary processes interact. For instance, when climate change decreases the duration of the snow cover in the mountains, white hares become more visible, and brown hares may become better than white hares in escaping the attention of predators such as foxes and white-tailed eagles. …

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