DNASense

Context

In recent decades, many ecosystems, including marine benthic coastal habitats, have experienced a loss of biodiversity. This decline in benthic diversity has a significant impact on the functioning of coastal ecosystems, particularly on services such as water quality. Monitoring programmes are essential to understand the consequences of biodiversity loss and to guide effective management and conservation efforts. However, for practical and financial reasons, traditional methods often overlook microscopic communities, the most diverse component of marine ecosystems.

Two recent technological advances offer opportunities to overcome these limitations: high-throughput sequencing of environmental and community DNA allows monitoring of previously overlooked ecological communities; and remote sensing can use satellite data to infer macroalgal distributions over large spatial and temporal scales. To effectively integrate these advances into biodiversity monitoring frameworks, it is crucial to develop practical indicators that can be applied within existing regulatory frameworks.

Main objectives

DNASense aims to advance, integrate, and harmonise the use of eDNA, community DNA, and remote sensing techniques to monitor multiple dimensions of benthic biodiversity. Key objectives include developing new biodiversity assessment indicators from eDNA datasets, cost-effectively enhancing the monitoring of benthic ecosystems, and integrating these indicators into tools for policy application within the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive.

Main activities

We will investigate biodiversity trends and drivers for poorly known groups like meiofauna, marine fungi, and benthic prokaryotes, alongside less studied aspects like genetic and functional diversity. We will use long-read sequencing technology for direct mitochondrial DNA sequencing (mitometagenomics), addressing taxonomic bias and classification issues associated with high- throughput methods like metabarcoding. We will also use remote sensing methods to quantitatively map macrophytobenthos on hard and soft shallow bottoms, with calibration against existing visual census programmes.

The project aims to inform marine biodiversity management practices and policies at various levels. We will actively engage with stakeholders like HELCOM, the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP), the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR), and the North Sea Commission. We will use our data to develop new indicators for effective biodiversity assessment, and we will disseminate our findings through comprehensive reports and policy briefs.

Key expected outcomes include:

1. improved understanding of spatial and temporal dynamics in benthic biodiversity;
2. increased coverage and representativeness of current macrophytobenthos monitoring programmes;
3. new indicators for the use of eDNA data;
4. the harmonisation and integration of eDNA and remote sensing indicators into existing marine habitat quality and biodiversity monitoring tools.