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The world’s deep ocean spans more than half the planet. Humankind needs and depends upon many of the deep ocean’s treasures, and the race is already on to exploit them.

Data from Norwegian monitoring programs make the basis for a suggested EU ban of certain chemicals in personal care products.

River invertebrates react the same way to decreasing glacier cover wherever in the world they are, say scientists who have evaluated more than one million of them in diverse regions with shrinking glaciers, to determine the impact of global environmental change.

Current environmental risk assessment data requirements are not sufficient for all aquaculture medicines.

Plastic in the form of very small particles, so-called ‘microplastic’, pollutes much of the marine environment. Scientists find microplastics in the majority of samples collected from the world's oceans.

In Norway, the aquaculture industry is economically very important, therefore possible threats, such as parasitic infections from sea lice, are important to control.

Researchers at NIVA have recently published a review on pesticide levels and environmental risk in aquatic environments in China.

Several important marine habitats in the European oceans are about to disappear. No complete mapping of existing or threated marine habitats in Europe are available, nor a full overview of the restoration potential of degraded habitats. These are the objectives of the EU financed four-year MERCES-project.

Many different methods have been developed to monitor microplastics, although the lack of standardisation limits comparability. It is vital to carry out standardised monitoring to acquire a baseline understanding of microplastic contamination in the Norwegian environment. A new project aimed to identify suitable methods for monitoring microplastics in blue mussels and sediments - with sampling stations around the coast of Norway.

Birch forest is currently expanding in mountain regions and far north. This trend is related to climate warming and reduced grazing pressure. A recent study shows that increased birch forest cover at high elevations promotes climate warming.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill constituted an ecosystem-level injury in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Much oil spread at 1100–1300 m depth, contaminating and affecting deepwater habitats. In this review, NIVA and American partners summarize the environmental research literature on the accident.

Researchers tracked the northern-most freshwater fish over an entire year with surprising results.

Efforts to reduce industrial emissions of lead have been ongoing for several decades. The near-global phase-out of leaded automobile gasoline has showed decreases in environmental lead contamination. A reasonable expectation is that industrial lead concentrations have also measurably decreased in the Southern Ocean. Since lead also has natural sources, a group of scientists decided to examine the relative importance of anthropogenic lead in the Amundsen Sea, a shelf region of West Antarctica, in the first measurements of this sort.

For the first time, biologists from Albania and Macedonia have worked together to improve ecological status in Lake Ohrid.

Since the millennium, water masses in the Skagerrak sea have become sufficiently warm for Pacific oyster larvae to survive the journey to Norway from the coasts of Sweden and Denmark. In the same period, the occurrence of wild oysters has exploded along the Norwegian coast. Is oyster larvae drift across the Skagerrak the cause of this great increase? New DNA analyses provide insight into the origin of the first wild Norwegian sea oyster populations.

To facilitate research on land-ocean interactions the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), with financial support from the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment, has established a new infrastructure in a river-fjord system (Storelva river – Sandnesfjord) close to Tvedestrand in Aust-Agder County.

Passive sampling is a valuable technique for monitoring concentration levels of hydrophobic persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the marine environment. New guidelines for the determination of partition coefficients between passive samplers and water have recently become available in new report.

Despite having increased human wellbeing in the past, intense modifications by multiple and interacting pressures have degraded ecosystems and the sustainability of their goods and services. For ecosystem restoration to deliver on multiple environmental and societal targets, the process of restoration must be redesigned to create a unified and scale-dependent approach that integrates natural and social sciences as well as the broader restoration community.