Limnetica 32

As we move deeper into the Anthropocene, the scale and magnitude of existing and emerging anthropogenic threats to freshwater ecosystems become evermore apparent, yet we are still surprisingly poorly equipped to diagnose causes of adverse change in freshwater ecosystems. Our main aim in this perspectives and opinion piece is to suggest some new approaches to biomonitoring that could improve on the currently limited capabilities of existing schemes. We consider how biomonitoring might develop in the future as “Big Data” and next generation sequencing (NGS) approaches continue to revolutionize all branches of ecology, with a particular emphasis on the need to consider not just nodes in the food web, but their interactions too, and also to look beyond our current reliance on the Latin binomial system of describing biological entities as “species”, when this concept is largely meaningless for many branches of the tree of life. We highlight the possible scope for enriching existing datasets to start assembling reasonable facsimiles of food webs, the need to collect and share more data more widely, and the value of metagenomics and metagenetics approaches to characterizing biodiversity in situ in a far more complete way than has been possible previously. Finally, we explore how these new approaches could provide a better marriage between structure and functioning than we have at present, but which is demanded increasingly by environmental legislation.