Intensive land use and far-reaching alterations to the fluvial hydrosystem, made feasible by technological developments in the past century, have reduced the hydromorphological resilience of the Rhine and Meuse river basins. Because the hydromorphodynamic processes could be controlled to a greater extent, residents of the riverine areas lost their sense of the natural dynamics of river systems,...

Microplastics result from fragmentation of plastic debris or are released to the environment as pre-production pellets or components of consumer and industrial products. In the oceans, they contribute to the 'great garbage patches'. They are ingested by many organisms, from protozoa to baleen whales, and pose a threat to the aquatic fauna. Although as much as 80% of marine debris originates fro...

Over the last decade, a successful re-introduction program resulted in the establishment of an otter population in the Wieden-Weerribben area, the Netherlands. The next stage of the reintroduction program intends to create a meta-population by facilitating the establishment of new populations at other locations as well. The current plan is to re-introduce otters in the river-system of the river...

Examination of the genetic structure of the vairone Telestes souffia based on 10 nuclear markers (microsatellites) revealed little-to-moderate genetic differentiation between geographically adjacent populations in the eastern part of Lake Constance in central Europe. Results emphasize the critically endangered status of this freshwater fish in the upper Rhine River system.

The aim of this paper is to give information about a new project on the Rhine River. In this project we intent to identify appropriate low flow prediction models for the seasonal and long term by comparing uncertainties in low flows predicted by different pre-selected models.

GUNNAR PETTER* , † , MARKUS WEITERE, OTTO RICHTER* AND SYLVIA MOENICKES* , § *Institute of Geoecology, TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany Biodiversity, Macroecology & Conservation Biogeography Group, University of G€ottingen, G€ottingen, Germany Department of River Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ, Magdeburg, Germany Faculty of Life Sciences, Environmental Systems An...

This research project focuses on modelling the large-scale morphodynamics of low-slope rivers dominated by mixed sediment, such as the Dutch part of the Rhine River. Usually we simply neglect the effects of sorting and variability in dune dimensions on the large-scale morphodynamics. This paper shows that these effects are not negligible.

Floodplain soils along the river Rhine in the Netherlands show a large spatial variability in pollutant concentrations. For an accurate ecological risk characterization of the river floodplains, this heterogeneity has to be included into the ecological risk assessment. In this paper a procedure is presented that incorporates spatial components of exposure into the risk assessment by linking geo...