DNAquaIMG: Innovating transnational aquatic biodiversity monitoring using high-throughput DNA tools and automated image recognition

Comprehensive and reliable data are essential to understand biodiversity status and drivers, predict trends, and guide management and restoration in the context of European and international regulations. Two emerging approaches hold great promise to improve current biodiversity data generation: DNA-based and automated image-based assessment methods. Combined, these complementary approaches can offer an opportunity for greatly enriched biodiversity data, while both approaches can be to a large extent automated to produce FAIR biodiversity data for large sample sizes. Building on its results and together with relevant stakeholders, DNAquaIMG will propose a biodiversity monitoring roadmap to fully seize the potential of these new methods into the existing policy context of the EU Water Framework Directive (EG/2000/60, WFD) and maximizes synergies between existing environmental monitoring programmes, jointly improving aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem management.