INESC TEC researchers have been conducting tests with biosamplers in both Portuguese and Belgian seas throughout the year. The goal? Not only testing not only the integration of this technology with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), but also its eDNA sampling capabilities in the assessment of fish species.
Off the coast of Porto, tests included the integration of a biosampler with the EVA AUV, in order to retrieve samples up to 100 metres deep. Researchers from INESC TEC and CIIMAR – Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research – also manually collected samples to verify the automated sampling process against traditional water collection methods.
During the tests, our AUV also performed precision bathymetric mapping, complementing the collected information with seabed morphology data. These tests were conducted in the context of the BioProtect project, an EU funded R&D project aiming at developing tools for biodiversity protection and marine spatial planning.
Our team also travelled for a second round of sample collection in Oostende. Up north by the Belgian sea, home researchers António Carneiro and Pedro Marques, cooperating with an EV ILVO-led project for the development of eDNA sampling capabilities in fisheries, installed a custom biosampler on a fishing boat.
After two deployments, this biosampler has proven to be fully operational. In the following months, all the collected samples will be sequenced to analyse their eDNA content, providing insights to improve stock assessments of commercially important species in Belgian fisheries.
