Romy Wild

Technical University of Munich | TUM · Chair of Aquatic Systems Biology

The interface between groundwater and surface water is a critical zone influencing ecohydrological and biogeochemical cycles within surface water ecosystems. It is characterized by complex redox gradients, with groundwater-mediated inflow of reduced substances affecting the oxygen budget of stream water. In this study, we have experimentally simula...

Predictions of stream water temperature are an important tool for assessing potential impacts of climate warming on aquatic ecosystems and for prioritizing targeted adaptation and mitigation measures. Since predictions require reliable baseline data, we assessed whether open‐access data can serve as a suitable resource for accurate and reliable wat...

Climate change threatens freshwater fish species due to predicted changes in thermal, sedimentary and hydrological properties of stream ecosystems. Gravel-spawning fish are particularly sensitive to such alterations as warming, higher inputs of fine sediment and low-flow all have potentially negative effects on the functionality of their reproducti...

Agricultural land‐use affects the environmental and biological characteristics of stream ecosystems through multiple pathways including nutrient and pesticide contamination, riparian clear‐cutting and hydromorphological degradation. These changes in the abiotic environment can have a direct effect on the productivity of macroinvertebrate communitie...

Intensive crop agriculture is one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive anthropogenic threats to aquatic ecosystems. Important agriculture-related pressures include riparian clearcutting and the associated loss of allochthonous organic matter inputs and shading, nutrient and pesticide contamination, fine sediment inputs due to erosion and run-off, i...

The assessment of the exposure of aquatic wildlife to complex environmental mixtures of chemicals originating from both point and diffuse sources and evaluating the potential impact thereof constitutes a significant step towards mitigating toxic pressure and the improvement of ecological status. In the current proof-of-concept study, we demonstrate...

Oxygen is one of the most crucial elements on earth and equally affects life and inorganic redox processes. After its transition to water with moderate solubility and slow diffusion rates, most aquatic organisms depend on permanent renewal of dissolved oxygen (DO). Recharge of this pivotal aqueous gas may become hampered by anthropogenic and climat...

Meeting ecological and water quality standards in lotic ecosystems is often failed due to multiple stressors. However, disentangling stressor effects and identifying relevant stressor-effect-relationships in complex environmental settings remain major challenges. By combining state-of-the-art methods from ecotoxicology and aquatic ecosystem analysi...

Benthic biofilms are often assumed to control terrestrially-derived dissolved organic carbon (tDOC) uptake in streams. We tested this by comparing ¹³C-enriched ryegrass leachate uptake in an agricultural and a forest stream, hypothesizing that a greater abundance of autotrophic biofilms in the agricultural stream would cause its whole-stream tDOC u...

Agricultural and urban land use has dramatically increased over the last century and one consequence is the release of anthropogenic chemicals into aquatic ecosystems. One of the rarely studied consequences is the effect of land use change on internal concentrations of organic micropollutants (OMPs) in aquatic invertebrates and its effects on their...

Impacts of invasive species are context dependent and linked to the ecosystem they occur within. To broaden the understanding of the impact of a globally widespread invasive oyster, Crassostrea (Magallana) gigas, intertidal surveys were carried out at 15 different sites in Europe. The impact of C. gigas on macro- (taxa surrounding oyster > 1 cm) an...

Emerging pollutants are ubiquitous in the aquatic system and may pose risks to aquatic ecosystems. The quantification and prediction of environmental partitioning of these chemicals in aquatic systems between water, sediment and biota is an important step in the comprehensive assessment of their sources and final fates in the environment. In this m...

Stream substratum restoration is a widely applied tool to improve spawning habitat quality for salmonid fishes. However, there is a lack of studies which comprehensively assess effects of the restoration on site, as well as on downstream habitats. Our study addressed effects at both locations and compared abiotic (analyses of texture, penetration r...

The Bode catchment (Germany) shows strong land use gradients from forestry parts of the National Park (23% of total land cover) to agricultural (70%) and urbanized areas (7%). It is part of the Terrestrial Environmental Observatories (TERENO) of the German Helmholtz association. We used this frame to perform a profound biogeochemical characterizati...