Corresponding author: Florian Leese (
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The protection, preservation and restoration of aquatic ecosystems and their functions are of global importance. For European states it became legally binding mainly through the EU-Water Framework Directive (WFD). In order to assess the ecological status of a given water body, aquatic biodiversity data are obtained and compared to a reference water body. The quantified mismatch obtained determines the extent of potential management actions. The current approach to biodiversity assessment is based on morpho-taxonomy. This approach has many drawbacks such as being time consuming, limited in temporal and spatial resolution, and error-prone due to the varying individual taxonomic expertise of the analysts. Novel genomic tools can overcome many of the aforementioned problems and could complement or even replace traditional bioassessment. Yet, a plethora of approaches are independently developed in different institutions, thereby hampering any concerted routine application. The goal of this Action is to nucleate a group of researchers across disciplines with the task to identify gold-standard genomic tools and novel eco-genomic indices for routine application in biodiversity assessments of European fresh- and marine water bodies. Furthermore,
European Cooperation in Science & Technology program (EU COST)
University of Duisburg-Essen, Aquatic Ecosystem Research, Universitaetsstr. 5, D-45141 Essen, Germany
This Action aims to advance the application of DNA-based tools and develop a roadmap to include them in the standardised ecological assessment of aquatic ecosystems in Europe and beyond, thereby optimising environmental management and improving nature conservation. Optimal environmental management is crucial, because aquatic ecosystems provide essential services ranging from clean water and filtration of pollutants to nutrient cycling, with direct impact on human society. However, land-use change, pollution, and the effects of climate change are impacting rivers, lakes, transitional and costal ecosystems and have severely degraded natural resources with negative consequences for human society. As a consequence, in 2000, the European Union implemented the Water Framework Directive (WFD) (Directive 2000/60/EC), a strict legislation to counteract degradation, initiate restoration, and manage aquatic ecosystems. The main aim of the WFD is to at least reach a good status/potential of all surface waters. The ecological status, as a main component of the overall status, is assessed through the comparison of biological quality elements (BQEs) of a given water body to undisturbed reference conditions. In four adaptive management cycles, deteriorated water bodies are identified and restored; research groups and a wide range of stakeholders are involved in the process. Although many surface waters have improved their ecological status it becomes obvious that the ambitious goals of the WFD will not be met (European Commission 2012, EEA 2012).
Although established, the bioassessment methodologies of the WFD are still intensively debated. From an application point of view, main problems associated with assessments include the variability, subjectivity and thus reliability of results, high monitoring costs, and the long time span required for sample processing; in concert these problems often allow for just one or two monitoring events per six-year management cycle (
While organisms sampled with traditional methods can be analysed in bulk, i.e. together after homogenization of tissue, there are also other approaches that make use of DNA that is present in water, sediments, or biofilms. This ‘environmental DNA’ (eDNA) can be actively captured using various molecular methods, and subsequently analysed (
Technological developments of genomic tools are progressing rapidly (e.g.
Different protocols have been applied to collect the material for bioassessments. The methods comprise: (1) the WFD sampling method (multi-habitat sampling and sorting of specimens (
The ultimate backbone of all molecular bioassessment protocols is the availability of a biomarker that allows the unequivocal identification of species. These markers are typically called “DNA barcodes”. For animals, the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase I gene (COI) is usually employed. For bacteria and protists a fragment of the ribosomal genes is targeted, while for algae and plants chloroplast coding genes are preferentially used. To date, no European DNA barcode reference database for aquatic indicators exists. This, however, is pivotal to address the WFD challenges. While many national barcoding campaigns have contributed substantial amounts of sequence data, the coverage is fragmented, incomplete and disconnected from autecological trait databases. Moreover, valid and curated DNA barcode libraries are essential to precisely identify the taxa with DNA based methods. While the use of different biomarkers for various taxonomic groups is important to obtain species level data, there is no general consensus on which amplification primers and protocols should be used to obtain optimal results for HTS. Those may be taxon and region specific and differ according to the aim of the study. For eDNA, species specific markers are needed, whereas for metabarcoding we need universal primers that capture biodiversity as a whole. These protocols will require mutual agreement on standard biomarkers and probes to ensure consistency of results.
Traditionally, the chain-termination Sanger sequencing method has been the method of choice for DNA barcoding and it is still applied in several bioassessment protocols. However, while Sanger sequencing delivers long high-quality reads and is still the standard for generating reference libraries, the drawback is that only single specimens can be processed and that per-sequence costs are high. This makes the method impracticable for high-throughput analysis, as costs are up to 3.4 times higher in comparison with the traditional morphotaxonomic assessment approach (
While every Sanger DNA barcode sequence is processed at a time by a researcher, novel HTS technologies do not allow for this level of control given that hundreds of millions of reads have to be analysed. Many different software modules and complete pipelines have been developed to perform this task automatically. However, sensitivity e.g. to the detection of sequencing errors, chimeras, or the capability of clustering sequences into distinct Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) varies considerably. Furthermore, monitoring based on DNA-data will generate petabytes of data that need to be stored in centralised, distributed, or semi-centralised mixed infrastructures. Thus, for routine biomonitoring a major challenge will be to identify a best-practice standard work flow to generate comparable data across monitoring intervals while ensuring long-term storage of the resulting data volume and access to High Performance Computing facilities (HPC) to perform its analysis. It is envisaged that collaborations with the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) and their activities such as the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE,
A central advantage of the HTS eDNA approach is that it provides information about the overall biodiversity, including small-sized organisms and cryptic species that cannot be recognised morphologically. This enormously increases the range of potential bioindicators compared to the traditional methods that are currently limited to few specific taxonomic groups such as fish, selected macroinvertebrates, and diatoms. However, little is known about the ecology of many genetically recognised species and therefore their use as bioindicators is currently limited. To overcome this problem novel ecogenomic indices based on eDNA data shall be introduced. General acceptance of such indices for bioassessment and biomonitoring will require extensive validation studies in various habitats in different European countries. Conversion and calibration with traditional methods are therefore required to allow the continuation of existing time series.
Possibly the greatest transdisciplinary challenge in the context of this topic is to establish a framework for implementation of new methods into legislation and to involve expert committees from other disciplines involved in the WFD regulations and policy makers from the start. The current implementation plan of the WFD runs until 2027. Nevertheless, the application of genetic methods especially concerning the eDNA detection of invasive and endangered species has started already in some European countries. Therefore, there is a need for rapid Action to standardise these methods and to ensure their accuracy and efficiency so they can also be used with a broader scope in mind.
In summary, this Action will establish a framework for aquatic ecosystem assessment that uses novel genomic methods for environmental diagnostics. DNAqua-Net will bring together researchers across disciplines to identify good-practice procedures for routine applications of genomic tools and to develop novel eco-genomic indices for assessment of European water bodies. It will also provide a foundation for subsequent collaborations in the context of environmental management.
This Action is timely for the following reasons: 1) More efficient tools are urgently needed in the context of the WFD to improve environmental management, and 2) Europe should establish itself as the global leader in environmental genomic techniques.
Coordinated strategies to counteract environmental degradation are essential for Europe and at a global scale. In order to achieve this goal a global network is needed that can assess the effects of different rehabilitation and management programs using fast, cheap, and reliable tools. With the emergence of new DNA-based techniques such as metabarcoding and eDNA screens, such tools are increasingly available. More importantly, they can be easily standardised and compared with ongoing traditional assessment routines. Thus, complementing ongoing environmental assessment programs with such tools to counteract biodiversity loss is of utmost relevance. This has already been realized by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has implemented a roadmap for the inclusion of DNA-based methods in water quality assessments since 2011 (
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1) Fostering knowledge exchange in the emerging field of ecogenomic bioassessment.
2) Connecting researchers and stakeholders involved in current bioassessment procedures with researchers developing novel genomic techniques.
3) Establishing a platform including a web-based system to inform stakeholders about the new techniques and gold-standard approaches for their application.
4) Facilitate access to workshops, Short-Term Scientific Missions (STSMs), and conferences especially for Early Career Investigators (ECIs), under-represented gender, and participants from countries with less developed structures for genomic analyses through the Action’s budget.
5) Inclusion across EU-countries:
Different biomarkers have been accepted as DNA barcodes for animals (
The applications of DNA barcoding in ecology range from species detection to biodiversity assessments and the analyses of species interactions. A particular effort has been made to use eDNA for genetic monitoring of invasive and endangered species (
From the perspective of bioassessment and biomonitoring, the two main directions of eDNA research are the detection of targeted species and the assessment of diversity of particular bioindicator taxa. While the first line of research is mainly based on Polymerase Chain Reactions (PCR) or real-time and digital droplet PCR analyses (
DNA-based methods have the potential to fundamentally improve biomonitoring and thus nature conservation. However, prior to the concerted implementation of the technology in ecological assessment (Challenge 6) there needs to be a central agreement on workflows, ranging from sampling and lab protocols to the calculation of biotic indices with highly standardised bioinformatics pipelines (Challenges 1-5). To this end, this Action network will bring together leading scientists representing both the innovative and more traditional monitoring approaches for a dialogue on how to standardise and further improve the innovative technology and to discuss a conceptual framework for its implementation in biomonitoring. It will act as a “think-tank” catalysing dialogue on the scientific basis of the rapidly advancing technology through meetings, a communication platform, opinion and review papers, and STSMs. STSMs will allow lab visits between EU-countries, with a particular emphasis on connecting new and old EU member states and on providing opportunities to test methods through available funds of national projects.
In the light of aforementioned challenges, such as the gaps between the emerging potential of new HTS technologies and lack of their wide application,
Another key innovation of
In the EU, water quality assessment is a mandatory pan-European challenge regulated by different Directives (e.g. Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC, Marine Strategy Framework Directive 2008/56/EC). To fulfil the demands of the Directives, networks of ecologists, water managers, and policy makers have developed strict implementation plans. The added value of this Action is to initiate a pan-European network of researchers using DNA-based methods applied to water quality assessment and link this new network to existing ones. The specific value of
This Action will move forward the existing pan-European efforts to develop an EU-wide strategy for the improvement of biomonitoring. At present, national and international Barcoding initiatives are compiling lists of their respective national inventories of organisms (see above and references). There are, however, only limited efforts to specifically focus on the target taxa needed to address the WFD challenges, such as diatoms or benthic invertebrates. Here, networking through this Action will bridge the gap by comparing the national operational taxa lists for WFD monitoring to the available barcode databases. Specifically, the species not represented in the databases shall be obtained and studied. This research objective connects to national Barcode projects, the international BOLD reference library, as well as several prominent EU-wide Earth observation programes (e.g. Natura 2000, LTER-Europe, EU-BON) and thus creates synergies between these and
The overarching objective of DNAqua-Net is to establish a cross-discipline, international network of scientists, managers, governmental institutions, manufacturers, and emerging service providers to identify major challenges in DNA-based bioassessment and provide standardised best-practice solutions to those.
Short-term scientific impacts are i) the harmonisation of existing knowledge and an advancement of DNA-based monitoring techniques, connecting research institutions (particularly in new and old EU countries), ii) the advancement of DNA barcoding projects and campaigns in order to complete existing reference databases, iii) provision in training for HTS methods, and iv) the initiation of national pilot projects parallel to traditionally performed assessments to compare performance and to guide further scientific and technological development.
Technological impacts lie in the dissemination of new lab protocols and bioinformatics tools to analyse HTS metabarcoding data across working groups / member states.
Short-term socioeconomic impacts will likely be the encouragement of manufacturers to provide adequate tools and the emergence of start-ups providing ecogenomic services for ecological assessment (biomonitoring).
Given the recent technological advancement of DNA-based methods it is expected that these techniques will gradually replace traditional field and lab procedures in bioassessment over the coming ten to fifteen years. In the EU, DNA-based aquatic ecosystem monitoring for the WFD is likely to advance most rapidly, due to the existing well developed infrastructure of monitoring networks (e.g. more than 100,000 sampling stations for rivers alone but also for lakes, transitional and coastal ecosystems). Replacing traditional labour intensive sampling, sorting, and identification with more reliable and eventually also cheaper methods will (i) greatly enhance the quality of data used for decision making in the protection of aquatic resources and (ii) save considerable public resources. By providing a forum for scientific discourse, DNAqua-Net also sets the stage for long-term international transdisciplinary collaborations that will result in joint research proposals that could not have been initiated without this Action. Therefore, the outcomes of this Action will endure beyond the proposal’s four-year period. Further long-term impacts will be the implementation of a forum connecting researchers working on the new genetic technologies with stakeholders and researchers involved in traditional bioassessment approaches. This will ensure the implementation strategy of genetic techniques becoming part of ongoing monitoring cycles of the WFD especially for the time after the current legislation frame (2000-2027), i.e. an implementation plan for a “WFD 2.0”. These discussions will be in line with the EU strategy referred to in the “Blueprint to Safeguard Europe’s Water Resources” (EC 2012) and it’s long-term vision (until 2050). A further advantage of the formed pan-European
The enduring impact of this Action will be the establishment of European leadership in the field of DNA-based assessment of aquatic ecosystems. Monitoring systems for rivers, lakes, transitional water and coastal ecosystems exist in most parts of the world and many countries have adopted methods comparable to the WFD. Therefore, there is substantial potential for harmonising DNA-based methods and consequently improving aquatic monitoring worldwide. If European companies and research institutions can establish themselves as leaders in this field there will be immense market opportunities to create jobs in different sectors ranging from SMEs to larger industry and academia. A vital precursor for European enterprises to gain a competitive edge in the eDNA and DNA-based bioassessment market is the set of standardised protocols envisaged in this project. The standardisation of DNA-based bioassessment will help to unify the market and increase overall market volume for manufacturers of HTS equipment and preparatory devices. The resulting specialist equipment will enable staff with minimal training to perform bioassessment tasks formerly restricted to highly qualified scientists. This will create business opportunities for start-ups and expanding opportunities for existing bioassessment SMEs. Overall, the resulting novel technologies and products have a strong potential to create new jobs for lesser qualified people while concurrently enabling highly qualified personnel to switch from routine to expert bioassessment tasks. Standardised eDNA tools will also be of utmost importance for the use in other contexts, such as i) the compilation of IUCN red lists, ii) invasive species programs, iii) food chain trackers, iv) agriculture and v) forestry (e.g. FSCs). Thus, the outcome is expected to contribute directly to nature conservation at larger scales.
The results of the project will be of special relevance to stakeholders related to the implementation of the WFD, Habitats Directive and Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). While not all developed methods will be immediately applied on a pan-European scale, it is our aim to introduce developed protocols in the CEN standardisation process as new working item proposals (NWIP) within the duration of the project. Thus, pilot applications of this COST Action will become standardised CEN guidance which will ensure their application in the 33 CEN member and 17 associated countries in the near future. Further, many CEN standards may also be adopted as ISO standards, especially if comparable ISO guidance is not yet in place, as is the case here.
To reach these goals, the approach of
For both, the detailed and the more general level of involvement of these partners are included:
River basin authorities, being responsible for the practical monitoring activities (including lakes, transitional and coastal waters), as well as companies and consulting agencies performing the monitoring. For the detailed level representatives of several catchments will be included, covering different regions and different levels of taxonomic knowledge. National authorities responsible for the nation-wide coordination of monitoring programs and the data delivery to the EU. These authorities will finally be in charge to adopt new field and lab methods and to ensure the comparability of the results to previous monitoring programs. It is therefore crucial to collect their opinions and recommendations. CEN SABE to improve exchange between science, industry, and policy communities. Involving CEN SABE ENV will encourage a more rapid uptake of the new technologies and methods in standards and ensure a better understanding of the demands of industry and end-users who have to fulfill environmental requirements. The relevant bodies of the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) of the WFD being responsible for the Europe-wide coordination of WFD implementation Certified Laboratories currently involved in monitoring water quality, providing species lists according to the WFD. Citizens and users of water.
From the beginning,
To foster collaborations and disseminate knowledge,
Two large high-profile conferences in the first and last year of the Action will be widely advertised. They will attract a diverse audience, including ecologists, representatives of environmental offices, and governmental agencies involved in the legislation as well as the CEOs of private companies involved in environmental monitoring. A joint organisation together with EWA or IWA is considered to maximise impact and dissemination.
Reports: The five WGs will also produce reports on specific topics (e.g. good-practice guides for different tasks) as soon as agreement has been reached. These will be disseminated online and through social media, as well as through public relation offices of institutions.
‘Cookbook’ and CEN new working item proposals (NWIP): The production of a so called ‘cookbook’ with details of suggested protocols for the accurate ecogenomic assessment of the ecological state in different aquatic ecosystems will be organized by the Core Group. It is expected that scientists from NNC and IPC institutions will collaborate on the production of the cookbook. Developed protocols and methods fit for standardisation will be introduced to the CEN standardisation process as new working item proposals. The cookbook as well as the CEN NWIP are expected to be available before the end of the Action (year 4).
Open Data and Open Science policy: One of the objectives is to provide and promote a barrier-free clear picture of the current state of knowledge and proposed research priorities. In order to make these conclusions widely available among the scientific community, open-access peer-reviewed publications in the form of opinions and reviews as well as method papers will be produced; these publications will be advertised on the Action website, and are expected to be available before the end of the Action (year 4). Sequences generated via Barcoding projects also as part of STSMs will be submitted to GenBank and BOLD, species lists will be shared with GBIF, LTER, and the GEO BON portal.
The scientific and commercial innovation potential of HTS methods is enormous. A fast growing number of publications in molecular ecological research aptly document the potential of the technology for rapid and reliable assessment of ecosystems. Furthermore, they allow addressing additional questions such as responses of communities, species, or genotypes to multiple stressors, while allowing inference of foodweb structure and genetic diversity from species to biomes. Thus, environmental genomic tools have a clear application range beyond ecosystem assessment or species monitoring in aquatic ecosystems. The tools can be used at global or local levels (IUCN red lists, FSC forestry validation, validation of the content of traditional Chinese or other medicines, species validation at customs and more). Therefore, the technological breakthrough of novel environmental genomic tools shows immense promise and opportunity.
The new HTS methods and monitoring approaches offer the potential to enhance European technological leadership and to establish or improve the business of globally acting companies in the field of environmental monitoring. A key role in promoting economic impact of
Compared to the documented potential of innovation, the risks of novel DNA-based approaches are restricted to a few primarily technological aspects.
i) Standardisation of workflows might be impeded by continuous development of DNA sequencing technologies creating new sequencing platforms every 5-10 years. Solution: it is necessary to formulate SOPs in such a way that they deliver comparable data even if platforms change. In addition, connectivity of novel economic and traditional biodiversity assessment methods needs to be possible.
ii) Implementation strategy: The majority of agencies and institutes involved in biomonitoring using traditional methods lack the technical facilities and expertise for molecular analyses. Solution: Through open workshops and an active dissemination strategy, this Action will involve the relevant institutions and offer training in how to obtain and interpret the data.
iii) Conformity of novel data with EU legislation: While DNA-based tools have already a tremendous resolution in identifying endangered species and invasive species and also provide exceptionally detailed lists on species diversity in ecosystems, they are limited in their robustness to provide biomass data. Currently, the WFD demands this information for some national indices on BQEs which may delay the acceptance for DNA-based indices within the WFD context. The proposers are aware of research efforts to address this issue and, based on emerging studies, confident that technological innovation will provide solutions to this issue within the next few years.
The aim of this working group is to identify gaps for aquatic species in ongoing national DNA barcoding projects. Specifically, the WG members aim at filling these gaps in cooperation with the partners of the pan-European network. Funding for these activities is available as part of national and international Barcode of Life projects (e.g. GBOL, NorBOL, SwissBOL etc.).
The aim of this WG is to assess the ecological value of potential new bioindicators identified by environmental DNA barcoding and to discuss the revision of currently used biotic indices to make them better adapted to the specificity of HTS data. In the context of ongoing monitoring, the group will compare available data of genetic assessments with traditional assessments. The WG will also evaluate the possible introduction of novel ecogenomic indices and the conditions of their validation. The results shall be made available through WG reports but also specifically as Opinion Papers in peer-reviewed journals. Definitions for a central database and architecture will be formed. A close cooperation with WGs 3-5 will be sought.
The aim of this WG group is to discuss and evaluate current protocols for sampling, processing, and laboratory approaches with the goal of identifying gold-standard field and lab protocols to assess BQEs with eDNA/metabarcoding. The WG will organise workshops for the assessment of whole aquatic biodiversity (bulk / eDNA metabarcoding) as well as techniques for detecting rare/endangered or invasive species (real-time PCR, digital droplet PCR). Furthermore, training workshops will be used to inform on guidelines for performing these techniques in routine application. The group will deliver reports of the proposed solutions published on the Action website and through an associated entry in the ‘Cookbook’. Furthermore, several STSMs will be coordinated with WGs 2-4.
The main aim of this WG is to identify best-practice approaches for data analysis. The group will work in close cooperation with WG 3 to understand the requirements for the input materials. In addition, it will work in close cooperation with WG 2 to implement the conceptual framework of quantifying biodiversity with the ecogenomic index in the new pipeline. A central aim of the WG will be to connect with other HPC / Big Data EU-projects such as PRACE and EUDAT, and discuss if solutions found in these projects are applicable to the HTS data problem. The WG will organise at least two training schools for HTS data analysis and data management. Furthermore, several STSMs will be coordinated between WGs 2-4. There will be a report proposing the structure of a bioinformatics pipeline using current resources, platforms, and databases but also a definition of functionalities will be developed.
This highly transdisciplinary WG consists of several researchers involved in WGs 1-4, researchers involved in the traditional WFD assessment scheme and in particular stakeholders and policy makers. The aim is to develop a conceptual framework based specifically on the results of WG 2-4 for new methods for real-world and large-scale assessments. Therefore, a first milestone during the first WG meeting is to learn what type of data and protocols water managers need in order to provide WGs 2-4 with such information. Special emphasis shall be paid onto legislation aspects that are critical to discuss and plan on a long-term basis. The WG will also actively advocate pioneering projects as part of the fourth management cycle to run side-by-side with traditional methods. 3-4 training schools will be organized in different countries across Europe by this WG.
The proposed timeline for the Action is shown in Fig.
1st Management Committee (MC) meeting and 2 WG meetings International Action conference (inauguration of 2nd MC meeting / Core Group (CG) meeting Setup of the Action Website ( 4-6 STSMs Action workshops (HTS techniques, DNA barcoding, Bioinformatics) White Paper published by the CG
2 MC/CG and WG meetings (taking place shortly before or after MC meeting) 4-6 STSMs Joint Student Supervision (combined with STSMs) Action workshops (HTS techniques, DNA barcoding, Bioinformatics) 4 WG reports Mid-term evaluation report Review paper
2 MC/CG and WG meetings (shortly before or after MC meeting) at least 4-6 STSMs Joint Student Supervision (combined with STSMs) Action workshops and training school (sampling, HTS techniques, Bioinformatics) 2-4 WG reports
2 MC/CG and WG meetings (shortly before or after MC meeting) at least 4-6 STSMs Joint Student Supervision (combined with STSMs) Action workshop and training schools Large international Action conference Presentation of ‘Cookbook’ Final evaluation report
Several risks to the success of the Action have been identified that could impact on the outome. However, remediation methods are outlined in Table
This COST Action is proposed by researchers from 14 COST member states, including 4 ITCs, 3 IPCs and 1 NNC. Participation from all EU member states as well as of further IPCs and NNCs is expected. The organization of the network is shown in Fig.
Management Committee (MC): The MC of
MC Chair: The MC chair will be the reference point for the Action, chair the annual conference/meetings (together with the MC), be responsible for the preparation of all scientific reports and the final report. The MC chair will be elected during the first meeting of the MC.
MC Vice-Chair: The MC Vice-Chair is also elected through the MC and should represent a different research field than the MC Chair. The MC Vice Chair will primarily focus on practical issues (organisation of the Action) and represent the MC in relation to the “external world”.
WG leaders: Each WG will have two leaders from different countries/research backgrounds. Junior researchers shall be actively promoted to take a lead in the WG. The WG leaders will coordinate the WG networking and capacity building activities, stimulate STSMs and contacts with other WGs. The WG leaders are in charge of further subdividing the working groups into sub-groups, coordinate the progress of these and preparing the WG output for the MC reports.
Training, Dissemination, and Liaison Manager (TDL): Will support the MC and WG leaders in the management and organisation of meetings. Organize training schools and STSMs.
Technical Manager (TM): In charge of technical preparations for the meetings and host of the website, handling contact requests.
Core Group (CG): MC Chair and Vice-Chair, WG leaders, TDL and TM. The CG serves as the coordinating body and monitors the Action’s performance. Additionally, the CG will have a proactive strategy with the aim of boosting the creation of consortia for the preparation of project proposals both at a national and international (e.g. EU programs) level.
The core group of this Action proposal is formed by world-leading researchers in the field of environmental genomics, bioinformatics, and DNA-barcoding. This core group will form the scientific backbone of
Thus, with over 20 proposers spanning all major ecoregions of Europe, this trans-disciplinary Action network connects scientific excellence with the relevant applied bioassessment knowledge to develop standards for novel eco-genomic monitoring of aquatic ecosystems. In addition, extensive collaborations with European institutions and related ongoing projects (EWA, EIP Water, as well as DNA-barcoding initiatives) will ensure that the deliverables of this Action will find entry into real-world monitoring and relevant legislation.
Through strategic partnerships with researchers and institutions from NNCs and IPCs,
The proposers of this Action already come from various European countries including also several states of the new EU-13 countries. While the application of genomic techniques for ecological assessment is still more predominant in the old EU-states, this Action will actively invest in the training of researchers specifically from the new member states to close this gap. To achieve this goal, funds for the participation of researchers from new EU countries will be allocated through this Action.
European Cooperation in Science & Technology program (EU COST)
Developing new genetic tools for bioassessment of aquatic ecosystems in Europe (DNAqua-Net)
University of Duisburg-Essen, Aquatic Ecosystem Research, Universitaetsstr. 5, D-45141 Essen, Germany
GANTT Diagram showing the planned COST Networking Tools to be applied to
Overview of the structure of
Overview over potential risks and impacts on project parts and anticipated remediation methods.
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Limited involvement of researchers in the Action | Too few researchers involved in the Working Groups, making harmonisation and standardisation difficult. | Already now over 30 researchers from over 20 countries have expressed their interested in this Action, making it unlikely to fail. |
Standard barcodes too long for working with degraded eDNA | Impossibility to rely on the standard reference database. | Design of new shorter barcodes, and build of a new reference database. |
Too many alternative technical possibilities for producing the DNA data | Difficulty to agree on a standard. | Set up of comparative experiments by the different groups, and organisation of a joint meeting to decide about the standard methodology (decision based on quantitative arguments). |
Limited engagement by stakeholders | The topic will be restricted to academia and not find entry into EU-wide ecological assessments. | By now there are established contacts to many dozens of stakeholders from EU- to local scale. Thus, only sporatic drop-outs are expected. |
Funding for national barcoding projects of EU-13 countries limited | Reference barcode libraries will remain incomplete for several countries and taxa. | National barcoding projects have accepted to cover sequencing (up to 10.000) from ITCs. |