Our Stories

Franz Essl, ECH member, ecologist and biodiversity researcher at the University of Vienna, discusses the EAT-Lancet Report with the ECH Editorial Team, focusing on how food systems contribute to biodiversity loss and climate change. He argues that protecting intact ecosystems is fundamental to long-term food security - and that only interdisciplinary research can address the complexity of global food system transformation.

On 25 February, Social Economist Valentina Ausserladscheider and Biodiversity Researcher Stefan Dullinger (both University of Vienna), discussed climate change, winter tourism, and biodiversity in the Alpine region with media representatives from several countries. We take a closer look at their research in our article “Melting Certainties”.

A recent Nature study led by the University of Texas at Austin, with participation from the University of Vienna (Valerie De Anda), sheds new light on the emergence of complex life. By reconstructing the metabolism of Asgard archaea, researchers show that oxygen-based energy metabolism likely evolved before the acquisition of mitochondria, suggesting an earlier origin of bioenergetic complexity.

At the event ‘Understanding Microplastics – What We Know Today and Why Panic Is Not the Solution’ organised by the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and the ECH of the University of Vienna on 27 March, ECH Co-Director Thilo Hofmann, together with other experts, will shed light on the current state of knowledge about microplastics in humans and the environment.

Thomas Böttcher has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept Grant for his project PhageTRAP. Proof of Concept Grants are awarded by the European Research Council to build on existing ERC-funded basic research and support the transfer of scientific findings into practical applications. Thomas Böttcher, ECH member and Deputy Head at the Department for Biochemistry, becomes the 160th researcher at the University of Vienna receiving a Proof of Concept Grant.

A recent Nature publication by the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics at the University of Vienna, written by Ioanna Evangelou and ECH members Silvia Bucci and Andreas Stohl, compares global measurements of atmospheric microplastics with model simulations – with surprising results: Previous emission estimates overestimated the amount of microplastics in the atmosphere. The results represent an important step towards improved emission estimates.