As the year passes, keeping themselves afloat has become more challenging for the Netherlands. Climate change and sea level rise are primary factors influencing the maintenance and reinforcement of the country's dikes system. Therefore, a new Delta Plan has been implemented to make the dikes system climate-proof …

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 …

Worldwide, fish species are the most threatened taxa among freshwater vertebrates and have declined by 76% over the past 40 years. Anthropogenic activities such as the construction of dykes and dams are the main cause of this. These obstacles are very important for contemporary society, but they pose …

Like most ocean regions today, the European and contiguous seas experience cumulative impacts from local human activities and global pressures. They are largely in poor environmental condition with deteriorating trends. Despite several success stories, European policies for marine conservation fall short …

Movement of 25 tracked bream over 10 days in Lake de Leijan. These are being tracked with acoustic VEMCO transmitters to see how they interact with the varying water quality around the lake, as part of the CANAPE fish tracking project. This helps improve the understanding of peatland freshwater systems, …

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 …

The present study focuses on the environmental and socio-economic impacts of extreme drought in the Aspiring UNESCO Scheldt Delta Geopark (ASDG). Climate change projections indicate that periods of extreme drought, as experienced in 2018, are likely to occur with higher frequency and intensity in the …

Early links in the food web are crucial to sustain higher levels in the food web. Molecules of high importance, for example unsaturated fatty acids, play a key role in aquatic ecosystems. Unsaturated fatty acids are produced by primary producers for instance phytoplankton. Almost all organisms need to …

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 …