EcoIndicators
Not all animals swimming in a stream are alike, but they all leave DNA behind. This project uses that shared trace to build a new kind of ecological yardstick: the Environmental DNA Index (EDIX). Rather than assessing river health species by species, EDIX combines DNA signals from fish, insects, algae, and bacteria into a single, data-driven indicator, one that could eventually support the same kind of regulatory water-quality assessments long carried out through traditional, labor-intensive surveys, but faster and at much greater scale.
The real innovation lies in combining this DNA and chemistry data with information on land use, river shape, and vegetation along the banks, all captured through satellite imagery and mapping tools. Feeding everything into modern statistical and AI methods reveals how environmental conditions shape the organisms living in the water, and translates that relationship into a practical index. Developed together with national and international cooperation partners, EDIX aims to become a genuinely scalable, non-invasive tool for assessing the health of rivers and streams in Europe.
To build this index, around a thousand water samples will be collected from two common German stream types, chosen because their communities are simple enough to develop reliable methods from the ground up. These sites overlap with streams already studied within GeneFlow, EpiStress, and EpiDNA, allowing results to build directly on each other. Crucially, these are also long-term monitoring sites with decades of existing water-chemistry records, so the chemical half of the puzzle is already there, no additional testing required, just smarter use of what regulators already measure.
Project: BEAM
Funding: Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung - Nexus 2026
Cooperation:
Runtime: 2029-2031
Contact: Till-Hendrik Macher
