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Project properties |
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| Title | Critical nutrient loads as ‘tipping points’ towards cyanobacterial dominance in stream biofilms |
| Group | Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group |
| Project type | internship |
| Credits | 24 |
| Supervisor(s) | Miquel Lürling (miquel.lurling@wur.nl)
Dr. Patrick Fink, Department of River Ecology (https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=34220) and Department of Aquatic Ecosystem Analysis (https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=34219): patrick.fink@ufz.de |
| Examiner(s) | Miquel Luring |
| Contact info | Miquel Lurling
Edwin Peeters (edwin.peeters@wur.nl) |
| Begin date | 2019/04/01 |
| End date | 2019/11/30 |
| Description | Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Division of Water Research, in Magdeburg, Germany
One or two MSc students will work on this project in a streamside mesocosm facility; experiments will be run in flumes fed with natural stream water; flumes will be supplied with a gradient of nitrogen (as nitrate) and phosphorus (as phosphate) concentrations, simulating an anthropogenic eutrophication gradient, e.g. from agricultural runoff or urban wastewater; the project’s aim is to identify critical nutrient loads at which the stream biofilm (periphyton) ‚flips‘ from a state dominated by eukaryotic algae (diatoms and chlorophytes) to a community dominated by eutrophication-tolerant cyanobacteria; community changes will be monitored by a suite of modern methods, including nutrient analyses, confocal laser scanning microscopy, DNA metabarcoding and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) of pigments. If two students work in parallel, also the influence of light will be investigated. |
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