PULSE: Advancing Pan-European Freshwater Typologies

• Applicant: Dr. Jonathan Jupke
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557888845

Eco-typologies are fundamental to freshwater ecosystem management, providing a framework for coordinating sampling efforts and defining protection goals. Large-scale eco-typologies are crucial for harmonized monitoring, facilitating international policies and conservation. However, current eco-typologies often lack biological validity, fail to account for ecosystem complexity, and are static end products instead of dynamically developing tools, hindering accurate assessment and protection of rapidly declining freshwater biodiversity. This proposal addresses these issues with a new eco-typology, PULSE. PULSE will leverage a large database of freshwater organisms’ occurrences (macroinvertebrates, diatoms, fishes, macrophytes) across Europe, and advanced statistical techniques, including joint species distribution modeling, Generalized Dissimilarity Models, and copula models, to improve biological validity. It uses probabilistic type memberships to acknowledge the inevitable deviations between human-defined types and real-world ecosystems. It follows FAIR principles and the method will be made easily accessible in an R package. This allows adaptability in the future and applications to other areas or taxa. PULSE is a tool suitable for freshwater science and management at a continental scale in a non-stationary world. To ensure PULSE’s ecological relevance, I will establish ecologically relevant benchmarks for evaluating eco-typologies, which account for taxonomic groups, spatial scales, and sampling efforts. Finally, I will assess PULSE's ability to improve continental predictive biodiversity models, demonstrating its potential to enhance large-scale bioassessment. This interdisciplinary project contributes to improving European freshwater ecosystem management and science. By enhancing bioassessment accuracy and facilitating harmonized pan-European monitoring, PULSE supports evidence-based policy-making for freshwater biodiversity protection.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Finland
• Host: Professor Dr. Janne Soininen