We are excited to announce the start of the sampling campaign for the project Fish-DNA-Watch. The objective of this project is to deploy two alternative fish biomonitoring approaches (eDNA and hydroacoustics) alongside regulatory inventories using gill netting in 12 body of water across metropolitan France. The goal is to validate their practicality and robustness, and to establish a national reference protocol that would enable their implementation for regulatory monitoring of lake fish populations. The project also aims to derive quality indicators from the eDNA data produced and compare these with the results obtained using traditional methods.

The detailed description of the eDNA protocol can be found here. A short video introduction into the key step to consider when collecting eDNA samples can be found here.