DTO-BioFlow works to unlock marine biodiversity data and enable them to flow into the Digital Twin of the Ocean, supporting new ways of understanding and managing marine ecosystems. A key challenge addressed by the project is ensuring that biodiversity data are not only collected, but also connected, comparable, and usable beyond their original context.
Invasive species management offers a concrete example of why this matters. Detecting biological invasions early depends on timely, integrated biodiversity information, yet such data are often fragmented across monitoring programmes and repositories. This article explores how advances in genetic biodiversity monitoring, combined with DTO-BioFlow’s data-integration approach, can support earlier awareness of invasive species in European seas.
When invasive species arrive in a new marine environment, they rarely draw attention. At first, they may be present only in small numbers, attached to harbour infrastructure, settling on artificial structures, or drifting unnoticed in the water column. By the time their impacts become visible, the opportunity to intervene effectively is often limited. This is one of the central challenges facing marine managers across Europe today: how can invasive species be detected early enough to respond, in an ocean that is vast, dynamic, and difficult to monitor?
Traditional monitoring methods such as visual surveys or targeted sampling remain essential, but they have limitations, particularly when it comes to species that are rare, cryptic, or newly arriving. Over the past decade, genetic monitoring has opened a complementary window into marine biodiversity. Marine organisms constantly release small traces of DNA into their surroundings, and by analysing this environmental DNA (eDNA), it is possible to identify which species are present, even when they are difficult to observe directly.
Large-scale studies across European seas show that these approaches can reveal hundreds to thousands of marine taxa from standardised monitoring deployments, including non-indigenous species often missed by conventional surveys (Daraghmeh et al., 2020).
Turning biodiversity observations into long-term knowledge
Early detection alone, however, is not enough. To recognise that a species is new or unusual, it is essential to understand what normally occurs in a given area. Without this context, it becomes difficult to distinguish natural variability from meaningful change. This is why long-term, standardised monitoring is so important: repeated observations over time allow scientists to establish biodiversity baselines, reference conditions against which new observations can be interpreted with confidence.
Across Europe, coordinated genetic monitoring initiatives are already contributing to this baseline knowledge. One example is the ARMS Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (ARMS-MBON), which deploys standardised Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures at multiple coastal sites. These structures act as artificial habitats, allowing marine communities to develop in a comparable way across regions. By analysing the DNA of the organisms that colonise them, researchers generate harmonised biodiversity profiles that can be compared across countries and over time.
The datasets published in 2020 and 2025 represent consecutive phases of this same long-term monitoring effort. Using consistent methods, the second study builds directly on the first, extending the time series and strengthening the ability to detect change. Together, they show how biodiversity data gain value when they are connected over time, turning individual observations into long-term knowledge. For invasive species management, this continuity is essential to identify new arrivals, understand trends, and distinguish short-term fluctuations from sustained change.
How DTO-BioFlow helps biodiversity data flow into action
As these monitoring efforts grow and mature, a new challenge emerges: ensuring that valuable biodiversity data can be reused beyond individual studies. When datasets remain isolated, their potential to support early warning, comparison across regions, and informed management decisions is limited. Bridging this gap between data production and data use is a key step towards making biodiversity monitoring more effective at scale.
DTO-BioFlow responds to this challenge by focusing on how biodiversity data can move beyond individual studies and become usable within digital ocean systems. Rather than producing new observations, the project enables existing marine biodiversity data to be unlocked, harmonised, and connected within digital infrastructures. By supporting interoperability and integration with other marine data streams, DTO-BioFlow helps ensure that biodiversity information (including genetic monitoring data) can contribute to the Digital Twin of the Ocean.
In practical terms, this means that early genetic signals related to invasive species do not remain isolated within individual datasets or publications, but can be combined with spatial, temporal, and environmental information. This integration supports more informed analysis, dialogue, and coordination, helping shift invasive species management from a largely reactive approach towards earlier awareness and anticipation.
Why this matters for decision-makers
Managing invasive species requires early, comparable, and reliable information. When biodiversity data remain fragmented, early warning is weakened and coordination across regions becomes difficult.
By enabling biodiversity data to flow into the Digital Twin of the Ocean, DTO-BioFlow helps make existing monitoring data more visible, comparable, and reusable across borders. This supports more timely coordination, stronger situational awareness, and better-informed decisions, without introducing new monitoring or reporting obligations.
This approach is relevant for policymakers, environmental agencies, monitoring organisations, and others responsible for assessing and responding to marine change, and it directly supports EU objectives to modernise marine monitoring and digital decision support.
Turning insight into action
Europe already collects vast amounts of marine biodiversity data. The challenge is no longer whether data exist, but whether they can be connected and used when they matter most.
Discover how DTO-BioFlow is enabling biodiversity data to flow into the Digital Twin of the Ocean and how connected data can support more effective ocean management.
Further reading
- Daraghmeh et al. (2020). A long-term ecological research dataset from the marine genetic monitoring programme ARMS-MBON 2018–2020. Molecular Ecology Resources.
- Pagnier et al. (2025). A long-term ecological research dataset from the marine genetic monitoring programme ARMS-MBON 2020–2021. Biodiversity Data Journal.
