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Research Project: Novel methodologies to assess the environmental health of freshwater systems.
Lead Supervisor: Dr Robert Ellis
External Partner: EmbryoPhenomics CIC

Freshwater ecosystems are some of the most threatened on earth, receiving a complex cocktail of natural and man-made chemicals as a result of human activity. These, together with alterations in abiotic parameters (such as temperature, pH and oxygen levels) result in complex exposure scenarios, posing a major challenge when assessing exposure impacts, and determining safe environmental levels, of novel and existing chemical threats, in the context of individual organism and ecosystem health. Overcoming this challenge requires the development of advanced, high-throughput approaches for rapid and detailed assessment of chemical exposures. Whilst such advances have been made for many vertebrate models, due to the greater perceived importance of these groups, analogous approaches are currently lacking for freshwater systems, creating a significant knowledge gap, which represents a major barrier to the assessment of the health of aquatic organisms and ecosystems. This project directly addresses this issue, developing and applying highly novel high-throughput methodologies that enable the comprehensive assessment of environmental pollutant impacts on invertebrate systems, with a level of complexity prohibited by existing approaches, which will ultimately lead to reduced anthropogenic impacts and the better protection of biodiversity in freshwater environments.

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