On the island of El Hierro, in the Canary Islands, water is a scarce commodity, and its inhabitants have had to manage to get it throughout history. One of the oldest ways was the Garoé tree (Ocotea foetens) which, like other trees that live surrounded by fog and humidity, traps the small droplets of water, so people stored the drops that fell from the leaves in a well.
Dr. Laia Pellejà, the new director of the Institution of Research Centres of Catalonia (CERCA), visited CREAF as part of her institutional tour of Catalan research centers. During the visit, Pellejà met with the CREAF management team, who presented their most important projects and recent achievements in research management.
Every lake is a miniature universe: it is a space with its own temperature and salinity, in which particular flora and fauna live and certain microorganisms develop. Thanks to their diverse nature, lakes make the ecosystems to which they belong more resilient and provide society with numerous benefits, such as water cycle regulation. However, lakes are also the backdrop to many human activities and are severely exposed to global warming.
Citizen science initiatives are increasingly valuable for monitoring the environmental health of cities. The European project CitiObs seeks to forge partnerships with up to 30 citizen observatories to make their impact transcend borders and make their observations more reliable and accessible for political action and decision-making at local, national and global levels.
The significance of COP16 - the United Nations global biodiversity conference starting this week in Cali (Colombia) - is closely linked to the historic agreements of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) signed at the previous edition, two years ago.
Spending childhood holidays in the Pyrenees camping with the family must undoubtedly leave a mark on adult life. At the very least, it conditions the way we relate to nature and understand leisure. And this is the happy experience that CREAF researcher Bernat Claramunt has of his summers.
