Meet Ana Filipa Felipe from the University of Lisbon and Christina Pavloudi from the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in this third episode of the second season of the LifeWatch ERIC podcast, 'A Window on Science', focused on Metabarcoding.

According to the Living Planet Index, populations of freshwater vertebrate species are declining faster than terrestrial or marine communities. They fell by 81% between 1970 and 2012. That’s a danger signal that researchers at CIBIO-InBIO at the University of Porto, part of LifeWatch Portugal, have been responding to for many years, studying the commercially busy Douro River.

Analysis of millions of DNA/RNA sequences in the LifeWatch ERIC cloud computing facilities - called Metabarcoding - identifies taxa within the water samples and then pinpoints, with reference to open-source databases, which species are native and which are invasive. Modelling the data can help environmental managers and politicians combat the invasions and work towards the UN’s sustainability development goals.