A work by CSIC and CREAF scientists highlights that wild plants are more fertile and more resistant to pests than traditional crop varieties because their roots release substances that help them to capture more nutrients and fight pathogenic bacteria and fungi in the soil. If these natural properties were transferred to conventional cultivated varieties, agricultural yield could be improved and the ecological impacts of pesticides and industrial fertilizers reduced.
The CREAF ecologist has participated in a series of interviews by the English journal Functional Ecology to researchers from all over the world to learn about their experiences during the PhD and to understand how it works in each country.
With a view to improving access to and the availability and use of geospatial data, the intergovernmental partnership GEO (Group on Earth Observations) has this year established a GEO Associate membership category for organizations based anywhere in the world and related to such data. CREAF recently became one of the first six GEO Associates.
According to a study published recently in the journal PNAS, climate change has caused forests to alter the way they grow, in that they only take advantage of the fertilizing effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) to grow faster if they have plenty of water.
Partially managing rivers to make them cleaner only by reducing the amount of phosphorus and phytoplankton, can entail undesirable changes throughout the ecosystem due to a nutrient imbalance. This is the main result of a study by researchers Carles Ibáñez at IRTA and Josep Peñuelas, CSIC researcher at CREAF, which was published by Science.
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