The HEAL group was pleased to participate in the Biolit mission https://biolit.fr/ for the International Day of Global Biodiversity on May 24, 2025. BioLit is a participatory science program on coastal biodiversity, created and supported by Planète Mer. It is run under the scientific responsibility of the Dinard marine station of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN). It enables everyone to take action to better understand and preserve the biodiversity of the seaside. We spent a day counting algal and mollusc species at the épave de l'OTAN at Octeville, Normandie, France. The best part of the day was apparently the beer at the end :-)

The HEAL group was pleased to participate in the LeDNA mission, organized for the International Day of Global Biodiversity on May 22, 2024 https://environmental-dna.ethz.ch/research/ercledna/global-lake-sampling.html. The global loss and redistribution of biodiversity is a hallmark of the Anthropocene. Our challenge is to generate information about how altered biodiversity influences ecosystems and use this information to change our impact on the biosphere. To meet this challenge, we must know where species are, how their distributions change in time and why. However, current methods for determining species distributions are expensive, time intensive and hard to do for multiple species and large geographic regions-​ rendering global trend analysis near infeasible. We therefore need a paradigm shift. In this project we utilize the biotechnology of the fourth industrial revolution (i.e., inexpensive sequencing and computational power) to empirically change how we sample animal and plant biodiversity to solve the infeasibility problem of tracking multiple species distributions on large…