Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML)

Water

In a continuously changing world, it is essential to safeguard one of the earth most important building blocks of life: water. The CML Water researchers aim to answer questions that safeguard water by developing methods to investigate water quality and by understanding the effects of human interference on aquatic biodiversity.

Water quality

Every organism on the planet needs water, including humans. However, via our needs our water sources are continuously being pressured. Our mission is to understand and protect aquatic ecosystems in a changing world.

Monitoring

We study human pressures in both the freshwater and marine landscape. This starts with knowing how and what to monitor. To this end, we develop new cutting edge methods of environmental DNA (eDNA) so that we can monitor biodiversity from simply sampling water. This not only provides knowledge about which organisms occur in the ecosystem, but also how numerous they are.

Effects

Together with new types of monitoring and comprising monitoring datasets as we do within the Pesticide Atlas, we also provide a solid basis for our environmental assessment experiments. For strong environmental pressures such as plant protection products, plastics and new types of pollutants such as Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) and nanotechnology, it is important to look at possible negative consequences before these substances end up in the environment en masse. This is what our ecotoxicologists and other stress scientists research in both laboratory and (semi)-field settings. For instance, in our outdoor experimental facility the Living Lab, we work at the level of entire ecosystems to investigate the impacts of human pressures on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services. Since its opening in 2016, the Living Lab is utilized to identify hazards of the highest and newest forms of ecological risks such as commonly used pesticides, invasive species and novel entities such as nanomaterials.

Sustainable practice

Research is a joint effort between multiple actors, not solely scientists. That is why our researchers commonly operate also in broader Living Labs. In the Vrouw Vennepolder they work together with farmers and other stakeholders of the Land van Ons initiative to investigate, for example, how alternative crop production and polder rewetting can change our agricultural landscape towards one that favors water quality and emits less greenhouse gasses.