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Industrial bioeconomy: Bavaria invests in scale-up plants

As part of the bioeconomy strategy published in 2020 "Zukunft.Bioökonomie.Bayern" ("Future. Bioeconomy. Bavaria"), the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs has launched a funding program to strengthen the industrial bioeconomy. With "Bioeconomy Scale-Up", companies are supported in setting up production facilities that use renewable raw materials with high added value and positive climate effects. These include biorefinery concepts and bioproduct plants.

Colombia

Colombia is a biodiversity hotspot: 10% of all the world's species can be found there. The country also has large deposits of oil and coal. The second most populous country in South America has recognized the economic potential of its bioresource diversity and has developed several policies related to the country's natural environment. An explicit bioeconomy strategy was published in 2020.

Two agricultural experts elected to head the Leibniz Association

In April of this year, the Leibniz Association's Executive Committee nominated Martina Brockmeier as a candidate for the presidency. Now the assembled members have cast their vote: With a large majority, the agricultural economist from Stuttgart was elected as the new president of the renowned research organisation on 18 November. From 1 July 2022, Brockmeier will officially assume the office for 4 years. With Barbara Sturm, the members elected another agricultural expert to head the Leibniz Association.

Symbiont supplies seagrass with nitrogen

Growing even though nutrients are scarce - in shallow coastal regions of temperate and tropical seas, seagrass faces precisely this challenge. For most of the year, there is no nitrogen in a form that the aquatic plant can utilize. Only elemental nitrogen is abundant in the sea, but seagrass cannot absorb it. Until now, it was therefore assumed that bacteria in the environment convert this nitrogen and thus provide nutrients for the neighboring plant.

University of Bayreuth (2021): Diversity of ecological functions on marine islands decreases

The research team explored the previously unanswered question of whether the global mobility of species can offset the ecological consequences of human-induced species loss. The oceanic islands were chosen because they have produced a high number of endemic bird species, i.e. species that are not native to any other region of the world, and at the same time many new bird species have established themselves there – thus it is possible to observe particularly well on these islands how the combination of species loss and establishment of new species has an effect.

Large-scale inventory of microbial knowledge launched

The National Research Data Infrastructure for Microbiota Research (NFDI4Microbiota) aims to structure microbiology data and thus make it more accessible. This is intended to help research teams leverage the data and organize their own data so that it is accessible to other research groups. The project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to an annual tune of 85 million euros, aims to support up to 30 consortia over five years to pave the way for better data management nationwide.

RWTH, ETH (2021) | Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emission plastics by a circular carbon economy

Synthetic plastics have entered almost every aspect of life in the middle of the last century. Within 50 years, from 1964 to 2014, plastic consumption has increased twentyfold. In 1964, 15 million tons of plastic were consumed, but by 2014 this figure had risen to 311 million tons per year. One consequence is the increasing pollution of the environment with plastic waste. Added to this is the rising global consumption of crude oil and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastic production.

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