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One million species are threatened with extinction, many of them already in the coming decades. This unprecedented loss of biodiversity threatens valuable ecosystems and human well-being. But what is holding us back from putting conservation research into practice? The journal Biological Conservation has published a collection of 14 articles on this topic.

By Barbara Gigler Research team from Graz develops biological methods to improve the shelf life of fruit and vegetables. Additional at the end of the text The crops have been harvested. Now it is important to store the various crops well and to preserve them as long and as carefully as possible. Post-harvest losses due to spoilage, however, represent a significant problem along the supply chain and lead to profit losses in the millions.

Researchers show path of zearalenone through the womb using new technology The human foetus is considered to be particularly sensitive to environmental contaminants. A team led by Benedikt Warth from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna and Tina Bürki from the Swiss Materials Science and Technology Institute, Empa, has now been able to demonstrate for the first time how the widespread food estrogen zearalenone behaves in the womb.

By Christoph Pelzl Researchers at TU Graz are working together with European partners on new possibilities of measuring vehicle emissions. Today, air pollution is one of the biggest challenges facing European cities. As part of the Horizon 2020 research project CARES (City Air Remote Emission Sensing), an international research consortium is working on new contactless exhaust measurement methods that will enable municipalities to take emission-reducing measures.

By Ute Wiedner Is computer-aided design and construction with natural materials a contradiction in terms? Not for TU Graz architect Urs Hirschberg, who sees digital planning as an opportunity for sustainable architecture. News+Stories: You conduct research in the field of digital construction, or to put it more precisely, "augmented architecture".

The growth in renewable energy technologies will render future energy systems more complex and volatile. So advanced control strategies are required to ensure their optimal operation. For this reason, the Bioenergy 2020+ competence centre established a working group focusing on automation and control in close cooperation with the Institute of Automation and Control at TU Graz.

By Christoph Pelzl Researchers at TU Graz calculate the most accurate gravity field determination of the Earth using 1.16 billion satellite measurements. This yields valuable knowledge for climate research. The Earth's gravity fluctuates from place to place. Geodesists use this phenomenon to observe geodynamic and climatological processes.

Orangutans make complex economic decisions about tool use depending on the current 'market' situation Flexible tool use is closely associated to higher mental processes such as the ability to plan actions. Now a group of cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists from the University of Vienna, the University of St Andrews and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna that included Isabelle Laumer and Josep Call, has studied tool related decision-making in a non-human primate species - the orangutan.

In order to understand the global carbon cycle, deep-sea exploration is essential, an international team led by geologists from Innsbruck concludes. For the first time, they succeeded in quantifying the amount of organic carbon transported into the deep sea by a single tectonic event, the giant Tohoku-oki earthquake in 2011.

Researchers develop approach to protect biodiversity New Zealand and other islands have experienced invasions of rats, Europe has seen the arrival of the spinycheek crayfish, spreading a deadly disease called crayfish plague: invasive species can put native animal and plant species on the brink of extinction.

By Hermann Schranzhofer, Andreas Heinz The working group "Energy efficient buildings" at the Institute of Thermal Engineering has been working in this area for about 20 years. The scope ranges from the development of individual building technology components to the design and optimization of complex overall energy systems for the heating and cooling of buildings and entire residential areas.

350,000 years of climate history hidden in Devils Hole cave: Geologists from the University of Innsbruck study rainfall patterns in the distant past to better understand how deserts in the southwest United States will be impacted by future climate change. Beneath the Amargosa desert of the southwest United States lies a hidden gem for climate research.

A system developed at TU Graz uses water as a storage medium for electricity and thermal energy. It can be used to meet up to 90% of our energy requirements - while producing zero emissions. Additional at the end of the text The idea is simple. A team headed by Franz Georg Pikl, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Water Resources Management at TU Graz, has combined the advantages of pumped storage technology and heat storage using water as a medium to create a "hot-water pumped storage hydropower plant".

Ethanol can make an important contribution to climate protection: at TU Wien, a diesel engine has been developed that can run on over 70% bioethanol. TU Wien has developed an engine that uses two different types of fuel simultaneously: it uses both bioethanol and diesel, which is used for ignition. A special duel-fuel combustion process has been developed for this purpose, which now enables the use of a large proportion of bioethanol in diesel engines.

Plants start growing earlier in the spring but, contrary to popular belief, this results in less CO2 absorption. Climate change influences plant growth, with springtime growth beginning earlier each year. Up to now, it was thought that this phenomenon was slowing climate change, as scientists believed this process led to more carbon being absorbed from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and more biomass production.

The effects of island remoteness from the mainland on the number of species found on islands differs strongly for non-native compared to native species. Numbers of native species on islands decrease with greater remoteness, while numbers of non-native species increase. This surprising finding has been uncovered by an international research team led by Dietmar Moser, Bernd Lenzner and Franz Essl from the Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research of the University of Vienna.

By Vera Haberfellner The availability of clean drinking water is not automatic. The 'Energy Aware Systems' working group of EMT is working on an energetically self-sufficient and sustainable water desalination plant. In many parts of the world, there is a shortage of clean drinking water. Climate change is aggravating the situation through more intensive periods of drought and increasingly occurring extreme weather conditions.

By Christian Sturmbauer und Konstantinos Tzivanopoulos University of Graz, Graz University of Technology together with an international research team discover new mechanisms of speciation Animals that migrated or have been introduced in Central Europe - such as the Asian bush mosquito or the Asian ladybeetle - feel extremely comfortable in their new homes due to changing climatic conditions.

By Siegfried Hörmann With increasing complexity and the rapidly growing amount of data collected in almost all areas of our life, it becomes more difficult to draw meaningful conclusions and to filter relevant information. The field of statistics has seen a big upsurge due to such new challenges. My research is devoted to some of these challenges.

What stops a species adapting to an ever-wider range of conditions, continuously expanding its geographic range? The biomathematician Jitka Polechová, an Elise Richter Fellow at the University of Vienna, has published a paper in PLoS Biology which explains the formation of species' range margins. The theory shows that just two compound parameters, important for both ecology and evolution of species, are fundamental to the stability of their range: the environmental heterogeneity and the size of the local population.