Current news at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science

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.

In his doctoral research, M.Sc. Jaakko Litmanen used biomolecule-based modelling to study the composition of the phytoplankton community in Lake Vesijärvi, as well as the diets of water fleas and calanoid copepods over a seven-year period.

The Oikos-Finland 2025 conference will be held at the University of Jyväskylä on 11-14 March 2025. The conference will bring together current basic and applied research in ecology and evolutionary biology.

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PrecisionPhage aims at furthering the utilisation of phage research and innovative phage technologies against global health threat of antibiotic resistance.