Ecology
This page features research that uses eDNA to answer key ecological questions ranging from species interactions, demography, and beyond.
DNA-based Diet Analysis
For generations, biologists have been confronted with a deceptively simple question: "What’s in the diet?" This question serves as the cornerstone for unraveling the intricate interactions that shape ecological communities and regulate the flow of energy and nutrients within food webs. It also offers valuable insights into how animals specialize in their resource utilization within and between species and the intricacies of their nutritional physiology. When aggregated across entire ecological communities, records of dietary preferences wield the power to illuminate the structure and function of complete ecosystems. Currently, with the advent of molecular-based techniques, such as metabarcoding, that have significantly enhanced the precision of dietary assessments compared to traditional approaches, DNA-based diet studies in ecology are integral to unraveling the intricacies of species interactions, population dynamics, and the functioning of ecosystems. And contribute to inform conservation strategies, support sustainable ecosystem management, and aid our understanding of the natural world. Thus far, we have ongoing projects focusing on Lion diets in Africa, to Wolf and Wood Mouse diets in The Netherlands.​
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Affiliated Members: K. Groen, Dr. K. Trimbos
Plant-Pollinator Interactions
Pollinators are crucial for ecosystem functioning and food production. Considering global change and pollinator decline, understanding the impacts of anthropogenic interferences and climate on the structure of plant-pollinator networks is vital. The accurate and efficient quantification of the interactions between plants and pollinators is also necessary in ecological network research. However, the traditional observation-based approaches have many limits such as time-consuming, low taxonomic resolution and large sampling biases. DNA metabarcoding offers unprecedented opportunities to understand the function and stability of ecosystems as this approach can largely eliminate the issues caused by traditional methods. This project aims to quantify plant-pollinator interactions and provide an efficient and accurate method by extracting pollinator DNA from flowers directly. If successful, this will revolutionize our understanding of plant-pollinator networks through a more efficient and accurate assessment, and we can address ecological issues with it.
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Affiliated Members: Dr. K. Trimbos, J. Zhang, K. Groen
Sex ratios
Given the rapid rate of human impacts globally, monitoring population sustainability is of vital importance. In fact, population demographic information, particularly in relation to the ability to reproduce, like birth/death rates, matting patterns, and sex ratios, are important parameters to understand population viability as a whole. Sex ratios in particular can influence the reproductive success of individuals, and when biased cause difficulties in finding mates, lead to parental desertion or cause sexual aggression towards females which can consequently affect the growth and stability of a population. Anthropogenic stressors such as global warming, habitat disturbances, and chemical pollution can distort population sex ratios through sex-biased heat tolerance, by inducing sex reversal, or even influencing sex allocation. But despite being an important factor for accurately estimating population viability, sex ratio is often overlooked possibly because traditional monitoring approaches are laborious, time consuming, likely biased and often invasive or destructive. This project aims to develop a novel eDNA-based method to measure sex ratios with minimal disturbance to the organisms and environments under study. The current focus of the project is on amphibians and freshwater ecosystems, yet our goal is to develop a method that can potentially be applied across taxa and environments.
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Affiliated Members: E.A. Didaskalou, Dr K. Stewart
