Airborne pollen monitoring is of global socio-economic importance as it provides information on presence and prevalence of allergenic pollen in ambient air. Traditionally, this task has been performed by microscopic investigation, but novel techniques are being developed to automate this process. Among …

Freshwater habitats are under stress from agricultural land use, most notably the influx of neonicotinoid pesticides and increased nutrient pressure from fertilizer. Traditional studies investigating the effects of stressors on freshwater systems are often limited to a narrow range of taxa, depending …

The hydrozoan species Nemalecium lighti (Hargitt, 1924) is widely distributed in tropical marine waters around the world. Here we report the complete linear mitochondrial genome of N. lighti from Sint Eustatius (Lesser Antilles). The mitochondrial genome with a length of 14,320 bp encodes for 13 protein-coding …

Classical ecological theory posits that species partition resources such that eachspecies occupies a unique resource niche. In general, the availability of more resources allowsmore species to co-occur. Thus, a strong relationship between communities of consumers andtheir resources is expected. However, …

Organic farming is increasingly promoted as a means to reduce the environmental impact of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics in conventional dairy systems. These factors potentially affect the microbial communities of the production stages (soil, silage, dung, and milk) of …

De samenstelling van de bacterie- en schimmelgemeenschap als geheel is specifiek voor elk onderdeel van de kringloop op een melkveebedrijf. Dat laat een verkennend onderzoek gefinancierd door de Triodos Foundation zien. Zo is de bacterie- en schimmelgemeenschap in de bodem heel anders dan die in de mest. …

DNA-based identification through the use of metabarcoding has been proposed as the next step in the monitoring of biological communities, such as those assessed under the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Advances have been made in the field of metabarcoding, but challenges remain when using complex samples. …

The heterogeneous nature of environmental DNA (eDNA) and its effects on species detection and community composition estimates has been highlighted in several studies in the past decades. Mostly in the context of spatial distribution over large areas, in fewer occasions looking at spatial distribution …

PCR-free techniques such as meta-mitogenomics (MMG) can recover taxonomic composition of macroinvertebrate communities, but sufer from low efciency, as >90% of sequencing data is mostly uninformative due to the great abundance of nuclear DNA that cannot be identifed with current reference databases. …

The use of molecular tools for the detection and identification of invertebrate species enables the development of more easily standardisable inventories of biological elements for water quality assessments, as it circumvents human-based bias and errors in species identifications. Current Ecological …