Current news at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science

Over the past 55 years, the Department of Biological and Environmental Science has grown into the largest department at the University of Jyväskylä. The main celebration will take place on 17 June 2025.

Work on mainstreaming biodiversity footprint accounting is already well underway. The biodiversity footprint of the average Finnish consumer has been calculated for the first time.

A ground-breaking paleolimnological method developed at the University of Jyväskylä provides new insights into the historical elemental cycles of Finnish lakes.

Postdoctoral researcher Visa Ruokolainen has received €30,000 funding from the Sakari Alhopuro Foundation to study intranuclear processes of herpesvirus infected cells. The herpes simplex virus 1 is also used as an oncolytic viral drug to combat cancers.

Researchers studied the number of butterfly species in Finnish municipalities using over three million butterfly observations reported to the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility. Kotka was shown to be the most biodiversity-rich municipality.

Freshwater pearl mussel is a very endangered, demanding and sensitive species, which survives only in gravel-bottom rivers with clear and oxygen-rich water. The mussels still live in many rivers but their larvae can survive in only a few of them.

The University of Jyväskylä is involved in the SafeNet project and their responsibility is predicting the current and future diversity of primary and old-growth forests. SafeNet launched on 01 February 2025 and will run for four and a half years.

The new study highlights that catchment area land-use affect the transport of organic matter from donor terrestrial landscapes to recipient lake ecosystems, lake organic matter pool origin, lake energy dynamics and thus the function the aquatic food webs.

Researchers at the Nanoscience Center have isolated giant viruses for the first time in Finland. The finding indicates that giant viruses are more prevalent than thought in soil and water, even in northern environments.

Last year, JYU.Wisdom launched a research project in collaboration with the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom to investigate the biodiversity impacts of the entire Finnish transport system during 2025.

Researchers have developed an innovative ratiometric fluorosensor. The sensor can be used as a novel viral RNA sensing platform which offers a much-needed possibility to detect real-time viral RNA appearance during infection.

Five international researchers will begin their projects at the University of Jyväskylä after securing funding from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.