CLIMACT Seminar Series - Special seminar with 3 recipients of the 2021 CLIMACT Starting Grants!

Alpine lakes are excellent sentinels of climate change as their chemistry and biology respond rapidly to environmental forcing. The Swiss alps are host to over 1500 alpine lakes, many of which have been newly mapped and thus never been studied. Microorganisms play major ecological roles in these lakes, for example in their primary production, the cycling of elements, and the environmental attenuation of contaminants. It is uncertain how physical climatic changes may affect microbial communities and consequently, their activities in alpine lakes. 2000LAKES is an innovative research project joining forces between scientists and citizens to jointly describe the unexplored microbial diversity in Swiss alpine lakes. In the first phase of the project, we sampled more than 60 lakes in the Alps and catalogued their microbial communities using metagenomics while building a culture collection of more than 200 bacteria species. In addition, we established a pilot program in which citizens can actively participate in our sampling campaigns and research. Our first results show that Swiss alpine lakes represent hotspots of microbial diversity and niches for the development of distinct bacteria communities. In the future, we aim to expand the 2000LAKES project by building an open research initiative which can contribute to expand the knowledge about the ecology of alpine lakes and to take actions to anticipate and respond to the consequences of climate change on Swiss alpine lakes.

Climate change, air pollution, brain and behaviour
Presented by Bogdan Draganski I Professor and Director Laboratory for Research in Neuroimaging I Director MRI Platform I Department of Clinical Neurosciences I CHUV - UNIL