MULTI-MON: Development of multimodal biodiversity monitoring for (small) wetlands – combining non-invasive underwater soundscape and eDNA-scape profiles

Biodiversity decline urgently requires efficient, large-scale monitoring programs to identify trends and guide management. Conventional programs have a number of limitations and do not deliver sufficient information to guide effective conservation planning. In this respect, the introduction of novel tools to biomonitoring has the potential to reduce the amount of fieldwork required to survey a given area, and on the other hand can provide more informative and comprehensive data sets. Wetlands are the most threatened ecosystem on Earth and their protection and restoration is integral part of several international conventions. Update and continuous improvement of inventories and biodiversity monitoring at wetlands to ensure contribution to species recovery is listed among the urgent priorities for wetland restoration. Hitherto, freshwater research has been largely focused on flowing waters and larger water bodies, with significant gaps in understanding, monitoring, and protecting smaller stagnant freshwater wetlands. These support a greater biodiversity than any other freshwater habitat, harbor many endangered taxa, act as important biodiversity refuges in heavily modified landscapes and provide important ecosystem services. To address global threats causing declines in freshwater biodiversity, fill gaps in conventional biomonitoring of small wetlands and enable an effective, research-led conservation and management that is based on more comprehensive quantitative and qualitative data over larger amount of taxa, larger areas, and longer periods, the use of technological advances and pioneering approaches are needed. The main objective of the proposed research project MULTI-MON is to develop tools for next-generation multi-modal biodiversity assessment and monitoring of small wetlands. Our research will develop, test and implement novel technologies for characterization of their underwater ecoacoustic expression and assess their environmental genetic profiles with comprehensive eDNA analyses. A series of carefully planned laboratory experiments and extensive field studies in three pilot areas in different biogeographic regions are envisaged. Within three interconnected work packages of the project MULTI-MON we will: (1) investigate eDNA/eRNA degradation dynamics to develop new standards for studying aquatic communities at different time scales; establish a regional DNA sequence reference database and develop species-specific eDNA assays for target taxa; (2) obtain information on the complexity and heterogeneity of the soundscape and vibroscape in small wetlands, on their daily and seasonal dynamics and construct audio reference libraries for targeted identification of target taxa; (3) compare and integrate the data sets produced by next-generation biomonotiring with conventional biodiversity assessments, evaluate their performance for specific detection of target taxa and use of method specific biodiversity indices to compare the structure and dynamics of aquatic communities. In the project MULTI-MON we will combine state-of-the-art knowledge from ecology, conservation genetics, biomonitoring, behavioral ecology, and computational audio processing to create a framework for non-invasive multi-modal biodiversity monitoring of small stagnant freshwater wetlands using underwater sound-, vibro- and eDNA-scape profiles. Comparison of conventional biodiversity assessment with non-invasive novel underwater soundscape and eDNA-scape approaches and their synthesis will facilitate more efficient biodiversity monitoring of these ecosystems. Planned project outreach encompasses publications in leading journals, attendances at international conference, dissemination to public and publicly accessible acoustic and DNA databases. Overarching dissemination targeting future applicability involves presentation of the next generation multi-modal biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystems to the key stakeholders responsible for national monitoring schemes.