Twitter news

"The overall support for that kind of projects is great and reflects on the mindset of newer generations, to be more self-determined and independent at work." (3. part of the interview) @EFFS_EFYR @EFYR_EFFS @niooknaw @LeibnizIGB @freshwaterbio #urbanponds https://t.co/aj7DIvt0nJ
— urbanalgae (@Urbanalgae2018) January 31, 2020

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who did our survey and helped to spread the survey about perceptions of URBAN PONDS! We will now get started to analyse the data. First results expected in 2020. https://t.co/eHOnWscB0D
— urbanalgae (@Urbanalgae2018) November 7, 2019

Big Thank You for interviewing us @young_isdr :) https://t.co/rEUyHCBn52 pic.twitter.com/uRxD8kkh6P
— urbanalgae (@Urbanalgae2018) January 30, 2020

News

January 2020: Interview of the Urban Algae project

We got interviewed by the Young Researchers from the International Society of Diatom Research about the Urban Algae project. Some of you have seen the tweets already. There are 3 parts of the interview. Enjoy the read.:

1) https://youngisdr.blogspot.com/2020/01/interviewing-urban-algae-project-1.html

2) https://youngisdr.blogspot.com/2020/01/interviewing-urban-algae-project-2.html

3) https://youngisdr.blogspot.com/2020/01/interviewing-urban-algae-project-3.html

February 2020: FreshProject 3.0

The new call for FreshProject 3.0 has been released.

Take your chance and apply until 1.3.2020. Good luck to all applicants.

November 2019: The Urban Algae SURVEY has finished!

We thank everyone who has filled out the survey and helped spreading the survey! Thank you very much :)

We will now start analyzing the data and let you know when first results are ready.

August 2019: The Urban Algae SURVEY is online!

Be a citizen scientist and do our survey to study the perception of urban ponds.

The Urban Algae citizen survey has ended on October 31, 2019 - Thank you all for your participation.

Available from: August 5, 2019 – end of September 2019

The aim of the citizen survey is to get new insights about the perception of urban ponds by society.

With your participation, you are supporting the generation of scientific data and high-quality research in Europe.

Your participation is important and will help us to acquire knowledge about the perception of urban ponds.

This knowledge can guide future planning and management of water bodies in urban areas, taking the interests of the citizens into consideration.

The survey is available in 14 languages!

Bulgarian
Catalan / Valencian
Croatian
Czech
Dutch / Flemish
English
German
Hungarian
Italian
Macedonian
Polish
Romanian / Moldavian
Spanish / Castillan
Swedish

1-year project report

Urban algae celebrates its 1-year anniversary (May 2019) and handed in the report to the committee of the European Federation of Freshwater Sciences (EFFS). When the report is approved by all funding limnological associations you will be able to download it under Results – Project documents.

Special Session and talk at the 11th Symposium for European Freshwater Science (SEFS) in Zagreb (Croatia) in 2019

Special Session SS6.

SEFS11 homepage

The 11th Symposium for European Freshwater Sciences (SEFS11) will take place from June 30 to July 5 (2019) in the capital of Croatia - Zagreb.

This year, the symposium is hosted and organised by the Croatian association of freshwater ecologists and chaired by Marko Miliša. Young researchers and interdisciplinary are in focus, and the symposium aims to join scientists from Europe and beyond to exchange, create and discuss freshwater ecology and future research.

SEFS is the home event of the European Federation of Freshwater Sciences (EFFS), which is - next to the European Fresh and Young Researchers (EFYR) and the Representatives of the Fresh Blood for Fresh Water (FBFW) meetings - the umbrella organisation of the FreshProject2.0, and hence of Urban algae. So, of course we will be there! Not only with a talk, but even with a Special Session (SS6.) on the linkage of natural and social science.

Abstract submissions are open until March 10, 2019. We highly appreciate contributions from collaborative projects that go beyond freshwater ecology. Come and submit your abstract to our session if you are interested. We are looking forward to what you have to say about freshwater ecology viewed from the side of both, natural and social science.

You can submission your abstract at the SEFS11 page under 'Abstract' and 'Submissions'.

If you have any other questions you can contact us directly: urbanalgae@outlook.com

See you at SEFS11!

- Your Urban algae team -

Merry Christmas to everyone from us

Winter (on our half of the earth) means that many water are frozen. Also, urban ponds can freeze in winter time and may be used for ice-skating. Whatever you do at your closed urban pond - we hope that you have a good time.

During a visit, Sonia and Cleo stumbled across this urban pond in Hamburg in December 2018. Even though not frozen, it was a nice calm atmosphere around the pond with all the decorative lights in the background.

IGB Science day talk

During the science day at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin, we were presented by co-PI Susanne Stephan. She presented Urban algae to her colleagues at IGB and other IGB guests on 13th of December 2018.

Here you can read her impressions.

Behind the scenes

Since August 2018, we are working in our little hidden scientific cabins. We are processing samples (e.g. dissolved organic carbon -DOC, phytoplankton, macrophytes) and prepare data for our "master database", preparing even more data to be used in the citizen survey, we are starting a statistics working group, managing the website, etc., and everyone's learning a lot!

Since August 2018: Being very active in the working group "citizen survey"

photo taken from: https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Using-Customer-Surveys-Improve-Service/191341-2.html

The Urban algae project aims to correlate the ecological status of urban ponds to the perception of Ecosystem Services (ES) by citizens.

Therefore, we are creating an online survey for citizens, in which we will ask questions about urban ponds. We want to find out wether or not people can recognise the ecological status of urban ponds, and further wether they value a pond of good water quality more than one of bad water quality.

Our survey will not only have questions, but also pictures and/or sketches to visualise certain features of urban ponds (for example clear blue water versus algae-dominated water).

However, creating a survey in a scientific manner is a lot of work. Moreover, this is a task, many of us are not familiar with. Luckily we have some fresh scientist among us, that are familiar with social sciences. The variety of competencies and skills in the Urban algae consortium helps us to keep a high level of quality and brings us forward much faster. The survey joins together social and natural science and we are working hard, to make the survey user-friendly, scientifically useful (key word: statistics), and very importantly answering our hypotheses - all in all we want to come up with a great survey in the end. The survey will be released in Spring 2019.

DGL conference

We were represented with our project poster at the yearly conference of the German Limnological Society (DGL) in Kamp-Lintfort, Germany, September 2018.

August 2018: Processing samples

After the teams completed their samplings, the samples were sent to IGB Berlin. Some samples were further transported to the Netherlands and processed at NIOO to determine dissolved nutrients and picco-plankton. We thank the AKWA group very much for supporting the Urban algae project with the free use of the autoanalyzer (dissolved nutrient analysis) and the flow cytometer (flow cytometer analysis is used to determine small phytoplankton communities in water samples).

Here you can see triplicates of filtered water samples from 56 ponds in 15ml falcon tubes, ready to be analysed in the autoanalyzer.