Environmental Monitoring Activities Research Articles

A portable air quality monitoring unit and a modular, flexible tool for on-field evaluation and calibration of low-cost gas sensors

In recent years, several research projects have investigated the use of low-cost devices for air pollution monitoring. As a result of these activities, various air quality monitoring systems have been developed following diverse approaches and methods. However, in most cases, these monitoring systems lack flexibility, extendibility, and openness. The device presented in this article provides a cost-effective, expandable, flexible, open-source solution. SentinAir has been designed to act as a portable air quality monitoring unit and also for facilitating the on-field evaluation and calibration of air quality sensors. The high grade of flexibility featuring this tool enables the data acquisition from heterogeneous kinds of devices deployed far from the laboratory facilities, even in areas featured by a weak or unstable Internet connection. Moreover, the system proposed in this article provides a reasonably easy way to integrate a wide range of sensors or devices produced by diverse manufacturers, offering a tool that is not bound to the use of a limited and fixed set of sensors or devices. The modularity approach followed in SentinAir design constitutes another key factor to consider: it allows each user to easily adapt this device to his requirements. This system is therefore capable of providing a robust framework for environmental monitoring activities to researchers or low-skilled end-users.

Distribution and extent of benthic habitats in Puck Bay (Gulf of Gdańsk, southern Baltic Sea)

The majority of the southern Baltic Sea seabed encompasses homogenous soft-bottom sediments of limited productivity and low biological diversity, but shallow productive areas in the coastal zone such as wetlands, vegetated lagoons and sheltered bays show a high variety of benthic habitat types offering favourable biotopic conditions for benthic fauna. Within Polish marine areas, semi-enclosed Puck Bay (the western part of the Gulf of Gdańsk) features an exceptionally diverse environment covering a range of benthic habitats which underscores its unique biological value and aesthetic quality and providing an impetus for conservation and ecosystem-based development. Full-coverages maps on benthic habitats in this area are therefore a necessary foundation for maritime spatial planning and implementation of strategies for sustainable management and protection of the coastal environment. This study presents the first comprehensive description and distribution of benthic habitats in Puck Bay which were categorised using the revised EUNIS 2019 classification system. Typological analyses were carried out based on inventory datasets from 1995 to 2019 including scientific publications, satellite images, open databases, topographic and geological maps, reports, theses, information available on websites and unpublished data shared willingly by individual researchers and administrative institutions. Collating various spatial data sources, that were first georeferenced and then visualized using techniques available in ArcMap 10.4.1 software (Esri), resulted in the mapping of benthic habitats and sites of important and protected plant species, which can contribute to the high confidence in environmental assessments and monitoring activities.

ANALYSIS AND MONITORING OF RIVER WATER QUALITY IN TASIKMALAYA CITY

The rivers flowing through the City of Tasikmalaya include the Citanduy River, the Ciloseh River, the Ciwulan River and the Cibanjaran River. While the tributaries are the Cibanjaran River which include the Cihideung/ Dalem Suba River, the Cipedes River, the Ciromban River, the Cidukuh River, the Cicacaban River, the Cibadodon River, the Cikalang River, the Tonggong Londok River, the Cibeureum River and the Cimulu River. These rivers flow and empty into the Citanduy River. The aims and objectives of this study are environmental quality monitoring activities, especially the quality of river water in the Tasikmalaya City. To find out in more detail and carefully the level of pollution that occurs, this study aims to conduct water quality monitoring so that the resulting data can determine the source of pollutants that cause deterioration of river water quality. Monitoring was conducted during the rainy season and the dry season. Based on the monitoring, it appears that the river being monitored does not meet the quality standards as a class II water body with varying status ranging from lightly polluted to heavily polluted. Parameters that do not meet quality standards include TSS, BOD, COD, nitrite, Cr6+, Zn, free chlorine, Total Phosphate, oil and fat, E. Coli and Total Coliform.

Mapping Monitoring of Environmental Conditions In Cilacap Waters

Cilacap waters are said to be busy with sea traffic with many activities being carried out in the Cilacap water area. Environmental monitoring activities are needed to determine the existing conditions in Cilacap waters, in order to support smooth and efficient traffic activities in Cilacap waters. This study uses a method in producing a mapping of environmental conditions, namely by looking at the aspects of changes in coastline, water depth (bathymetry), wind direction, and velocity, as well as models of surface currents speed and direction in Cilacap waters. The results of this study indicate that the environmental conditions in Cilacap waters are still relatively not much different from the conditions in the previous year, namely 2017. The value of modeling ocean currents which are influenced by sea tides and ebbs has a relatively small value with values ranging from 0.1-1.5 m / s with an average speed of 0.4 m / s that occurs in June (east season). In June 2020 the wind in the Cilacap water area blows from the east and southeast with speeds ranging from 2.5 - 7 m / s. The bathymetry measurement results showed a result of less than -2 meters. These results also indicate a relatively gentle seabed slope with a maximum depth of more than -30 meters in Cilacap waters. This clearly shows that the morphology of the coast and the condition of Cilacap waters are not relatively significant, experiencing changes every year.

ESD Operators: Roles and Duties for the Environmental Monitoring Activities of ARPA Puglia

ARPA Puglia (Italy), the Regional Agency for the Environmental Prevention and Protection, has chosen to use the Scientific Diving Operator figure (ESD) in order to meet some of the environmental monitoring activities foreseen by European Directives, such as WFD-Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC and the MSFD-Marine Strategy Framework Directive 2008/56/EC. Regarding the environmental monitoring obligations of the aforementioned Directives, many of them involve underwater operations. For example, both Directives (MSFD and WFD) require Posidonia oceanica monitoring in situ, by collecting data on shoot density and other eco-biometric parameters, also describing the main ecological aspect of seagrass meadows; about Pinna nobilis, the visual census of its distribution and abundance is carried out underwater; the non-indigenous species census provided by MSFD requires the qualitative and quantitative sampling of the benthic communities of hard bottoms in harbors performed by a scratching technique. All the described activities need operations by ESDs, so ARPA Puglia developed a path for the implementation of good practices on the subject: adopting the national Guide Lines Good practices for the safe performance of the underwater activities” (ISPRA manual n. 94/2013; D.D.G. n.229/2016); identifying the diving equipment as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE); allowing the acquisition or renewal of ESD scientific license for the operational staff; allowing the annual medical check-up for the ESD operational staff; opening of a national call in order to acquire specialized figures, selected according to ESD Panel standards. Details of environmental monitoring activities carried out by ARPA Puglia ESDs are described in this document.

Environmental surveillance of the steel industry by the people: the experiences of Piquiá de Baixo (MA) and Santa Cruz (RJ)

Environmental surveillance by the people fosters the protagonism of individuals in a situation of environmental vulnerability to generate and evaluate data regarding the pollution to which they are exposed. The scope of this work was to analyze such experiences in two areas impacted by the steel industry: Santa Cruz/RJ and Piquiá de Baixo/MA. At these sites, community environmental monitoring (CEM) activities were conducted to measure 2.5 micrometer particulate matter (PM2.5) levels in the atmosphere, between November/2016 and July/2017. Such activities were conducted using a low-cost and easy-to-operate air quality monitor. Monthly averages of PM2.5 levels in Piquiá and Santa Cruz were high, depending on the period assessed, since they surpassed the annual average recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) of 10 µg/m3, and, on several occasions, the recommended daily average of 25 µg/m3. The main idea of this monitoring proposal was to establish a process capable of presenting a counterpoint to official information on local atmospheric pollution scenarios, with the involvement of affected communities. The pollution data produced enable these communities to participate in public debates and decision-making processes in a more informed way.

Predatory fishing monitoring with the use of geographic information system

The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) determines a regulatory set of instructions for fisheries agreements. These rules control fishing activity in Brazilian basins during closed fishing seasons. However, many fishermen violate the agreements, as seen in the river basin Uba, in the municipality of Moju-Pará. When fishermen breach IBAMA’s stated regulations, the municipality is urged to act on the case, but with little knowledge of critical areas which suffer from overfishing. This makes the logistics of solving these issues difficult and often problematic. This work strives to serve as an aid to environmental agencies in their endeavor to inspect and regulate the issue of overfishing in critical areas, such as the Úba river basin in the municipality of Moju-Para. Our methods include a literature review of research concerning the issue, identifying critical points, as well as preparing maps and proposals for the site of environmental monitoring activities in the city. From within the critical points, we identified the hot spots. We observed five distinct vegetation types located roughly 10 kilometers along the river, and the corresponding agricultural anthropic areas to 49% of the entire study area’s territory. It is noted that the areas of greatest concentrations of overfished territories are lined with countryside, forest and dense vegetation. Thus, environmental inspections should take place in areas near the communities and the Úba river and especially in the area beyond the Levi resort, where the hot spot was identified, while always considering the logistics for hard to reach areas.

Realisasi Program Pengelolaan dan Pemantauan Lingkungan (UKL-UPL) di Kota Sorong

Environmentally sound development is a development effort undertaken with due regard to environmental aspects. UKL-UPL is an instrument that is expected to be a deterrent of environmental pollution and damage, which in its application UKL-UPL is one of the prerequisites to obtain Environmental Permit. The aim of the research is to know the realization of environmental management and monitoring activities as contained in the UKL-UPL document of environmental permit holders in Sorong City area and the factors that influence the successful implementation of environmental management and monitoring activities. Objects observed in this study were environmental permit holders who implement environmental management and monitoring (UKL-UPL) program in Sorong City. The environmental permit holders are three (3) types of business and or activity consisting of andesite mining activities by PT. Lintas Artha Lestari, then shopping service activities by Mall Ramayana and Activity of power plant by PLTD Klasaman. The method used in this research was descriptive method with observation and interview technique. The results of research in general realization of each business owner and or activity in realizing environmental management program was relatively different both in terms of the number and completion of the completion of activities. PT. Lintas Artha Lestari successful UKL realization UPL quite successful. Factors that contribute to the realization are Policy and institutional resources and supervision. PT. Prima Lestari Investindo (Ramayana Mall) realization UKL was quite successful, realization UPL did not succeed. Factors that contribute to the realization are supervision and policy and institutional resources. PLTD Classification Realization UKL successful, realization UPL successful. Institutional, resource, policy and supervisory factors contributed equally to the realization of UKL-UPL.

Request–Response and Censoring-Based Energy-Efficient Decentralized Change-Point Detection With IoT Applications

Change-point detection (CPD) from streaming data is a fundamental problem in statistical signal processing and has wide applications in wireless sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), such as environmental monitoring and physical activity detection. In various detection schemes, decentralized detection without fusion center is becoming increasingly popular for IoT applications since it enjoys the benefit of strong robustness and security. However, it faces the big challenge of high energy consumption. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient decentralized CPD algorithm called request–response and censoring-based cumulative sum. Specifically, we design a novel communication strategy based on request–response and censoring scheme, which could help the sensors extract useful information from the neighbor sets with a low amount of communication. Furthermore, to provide a guideline on selecting the parameters involved in our algorithm, we theoretically analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm under a simplification for the most interesting cases, in terms of two standard criteria average running length (ARL) and expected detection delay (EDD). Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, we test the feasibility of the proposed algorithm in the physical activity CPD task. The experimental results on the real-world data set demonstrate its high energy efficiency and small detection delay.

Environmental monitoring and microbiological activity of chernozem leached in agrocenoses of the Krasnoyarsk forest-steppe

Adapting agroecosystems to the specific natural conditions of the region, as well as to the levels of man-made load on agrocenoses, is a priority task for reproducing the necessary level of soil fertility, ensuring the environmental safety of arable soils. The results of monitoring indicators of microbiological activity of chernozome leached in agrocenoses of Krasnoyarsk forest-steppe are presented. The number of ecological-trophic groups of microorganisms and the activity of oxidative and hydrolytic soil enzymes were investigated. The results of the biological assessment of the soil condition of the rhizosphere of agricultural plants may be the basis for rationing the level of anthropogenic impact on agroecosystems in the region. An increase in the activity of the catalase enzyme compared to the soil of the alfalfa rhizosphere has been established in chernozem samples in wheat and barley crops. The activity of hydrolytic protease and invertase enzymes also increased in these samples. A study of the activity of catalase and protease enzymes is recommended for environmental monitoring and control of soil conditions in crops (especially wheat and barley).

Apollon: Towards a citizen science methodology for urban environmental monitoring

The collaborative power of ICT systems is a key enabler of social and technological advances providing multiple opportunities for public involvement in participatory activities, thanks to novel paradigms like citizen science and mobile crowd sensing. These paradigms, if applied according to specific methodologies, promise to increase the pervasive observation of urban environmental pollution either directly by human observers, or by means of crowd-sourcing data measurement tasks using sensors in smart phones or other mobile devices. We propose a platform, named Apollon, to enable scientists and others to take part in citizen science projects based on the exploitation of mobile devices. The platform has been implemented and validated in an educational context, in which students participate in urban environmental monitoring activities. In the paper, we describe the platform and the approach developed to produce successful experiments.

Integrated early warning systems in marine bivalves reveal detrimental alterations of coastal habitats

Several biological levels are considered as signals of environmental perturbations so that integrative biological responses have been proposed in environmental monitoring activities. We evaluated the use of markers in Mytilus galloprovincialis at two different levels (protein nitration and S-nitrosylation, and geometric morphometrics) to investigate the sea coastal environmental status. We studied adductor muscle, digestive gland and valves of mussels collected from 3 sampling sites (2 disturbed + 1 control) in eastern Tyrrhenian Sea, and 2 (1 + 1) in western Ionian Sea. Molecular and morphometric markers showed significant variations in relation to environmental conditions, but the most interesting result was evidenced by the analysis of covariation between both protein post-translational modifications and geometric morphometric descriptors. The main interesting finding regards the relationship between protein nitration values (an irreversible molecular marker) of both adductor muscle and digestive gland, and geometric morphometric descriptors (that are Procrustes’ distances) of valve shapes. Molecular and morphometric markers revealed useful warning systems in detecting environmental changes, even if causes and mechanisms altering both cellular metabolism and shape morphology are still unclear. Our findings suggested that pollutants affected the normal cellular metabolic pathways altering the correct functionality at higher biological levels and producing developmental detrimental noise visible on the shell.

Unprecedented record of unique Bryde's whale (Balaenoptera edeni) off the southern coast of the marine environmental protection area, São Paulo state, Brazil.

This note documents the first record of a Bryde’s whale (Balaenoptera edeni) in the South Coast Marine Environmental Protection Area (APAMLS), State of São Paulo, Brazil. This observation was made during the environmental monitoring activity of the Center, on December 7, 2016. A single specimen was sighted and photographed near the Island of Cardoso, south coast of the State of São Paulo. This species occurs between parallels of 40 ° N and 40 ° S, however, Bryde’s whale observations are still very limited on the Brazilian coast. These records represent important sources for knowing the biology and ecology of the species, besides subsidizing policies of environmental planning for the South Coast Marine (EPA).

The Ecobiomics project: Advancing metagenomics assessment of soil health and freshwater quality in Canada

Transformative advances in metagenomics are providing an unprecedented ability to characterize the enormous diversity of microorganisms and invertebrates sustaining soil health and water quality. These advances are enabling a better recognition of the ecological linkages between soil and water, and the biodiversity exchanges between these two reservoirs. They are also providing new perspectives for understanding microorganisms and invertebrates as part of interacting communities (i.e. microbiomes and zoobiomes), and considering plants, animals, and humans as holobionts comprised of their own cells as well as diverse microorganisms and invertebrates often acquired from soil and water. The Government of Canada's Genomics Research and Development Initiative (GRDI) launched the Ecobiomics Project to coordinate metagenomics capacity building across federal departments, and to apply metagenomics to better characterize microbial and invertebrate biodiversity for advancing environmental assessment, monitoring, and remediation activities. The Project has adopted standard methods for soil, water, and invertebrate sampling, collection and provenance of metadata, and nucleic acid extraction. High-throughput sequencing is located at a centralized sequencing facility. A centralized Bioinformatics Platform was established to enable a novel government-wide approach to harmonize metagenomics data collection, storage and bioinformatics analyses. Sixteen research projects were initiated under Soil Microbiome, Aquatic Microbiome, and Invertebrate Zoobiome Themes. Genomic observatories were established at long-term environmental monitoring sites for providing more comprehensive biodiversity reference points to assess environmental change.

Assessment of Image-Texture Improvement Applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery for the Identification of Biotic Stress in Espeletia. Case Study: Moorlands of Chingaza (Colombia)

Espeletia is one of the most representative endemic species of moorland ecosystems, and is currently being affected by biotic stress. Meanwhile, the analysis of images obtained by means of unmanned aerial vehicle imagery has proved its usefulness in environmental monitoring activities. The present work is aimed at establishing whether image-texture analysis applied to unmanned aerial vehicle imagery from Moorlands of Chingaza (Colombia) allows the identification of biotic stress in Espeletia. To this end, this study makes use of occurrence analysis, gray-level co-occurrence matrix, and Fourier transform. Identification of healthy/unhealthy Espeletia is conducted using maximum likelihood tests and support vector machines. The results are assessed based on overall accuracy, the kappa coefficient and bhattacharyya distance. By combining spectral and image-texture information, it is shown that classification accuracy increases, reaching kappa coefficient values of 0,9824 and overall accuracy values of 99,51%.

The Effectiveness of Internal Control System and Role of Internal Audit on Local Government Performance

This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of control environmental components and monitoring activities as part of the internal control system and examine the effect of partially control environment variables, monitoring activities and the role of internal audit on the performance of local governments in Surakarta. The samples used were 126 employees consisting of a head and a staff in 33 regional organization in Surakarta. The method of analysis using descriptive statistics and linear regression. The results showed that the components of the control environment and monitoring activity on the local government in Surakarta has been done effectively. Research also proves their influence in partial control environment, monitoring activities and the role of internal audit on local government performance.

Ecobiomics: Environmental metagenomic biomonitoring

Land use disturbances are having enormous adverse impacts on the biodiversity and integrity of natural and managed ecosystems around the world. Adverse impacts on biodiversity are compromising ecosystem services and processes, reducing ecosystem resilience, and leading to unpredictable ecosystem responses to environmental change. The Metagenomics-Based Ecosystem Biomonitoring Project (EcoBiomics) focuses on the urgent need to better understand the extent and significance of ongoing changes to biodiversity in the soil and aquatic ecosystems that sustain essential ecosystem services upon which Canadians and the Canadian economy depend. This project uniquely recognizes that a breadth of scientific expertise from within the Canadian government is required to undertake this research, which is spread across relevant departments and agencies with Biodiversity portfolios. It involves over 50 participants (researchers, technicians, bioinformaticians, software developers, managers and students, etc.) contributing to many smaller projects in several locations across Canada organized by themes. The objectives of this project include: Develop standard soil and water methods and a federal Bioinformatics Platform to harmonize analyses of metabarcoding, metagenomics and metatranscriptomics data across federal departments/agencies; Establish genomic observatories and comprehensive biodiversity baselines for assessing future changes to water and soil biodiversity at long-term environmental monitoring sites in Canada; Develop new knowledge to improve water quality and soil health by comprehensively characterizing aquatic microbiomes, soil microbiomes, and invertebrate zoobiomes, and testing hypotheses to enhance environmental assessment, monitoring, and remediation activities. Develop standard soil and water methods and a federal Bioinformatics Platform to harmonize analyses of metabarcoding, metagenomics and metatranscriptomics data across federal departments/agencies; Establish genomic observatories and comprehensive biodiversity baselines for assessing future changes to water and soil biodiversity at long-term environmental monitoring sites in Canada; Develop new knowledge to improve water quality and soil health by comprehensively characterizing aquatic microbiomes, soil microbiomes, and invertebrate zoobiomes, and testing hypotheses to enhance environmental assessment, monitoring, and remediation activities. Our poster will focus primarily on the challenges associated with the first objective. Genomic technologies are revolutionizing biodiversity assessment in soil and aquatic ecosystems, and they now offer the only practical way to comprehensively characterize this enormous biodiversity. These technologies and associated tools allow us to obtain comprehensive baseline biodiversity data that are essential to support evidence-based decision-making. However, a strong focus of this project is to enable environmental assessment, monitoring, and remediation activities by a multitude of potential end users and thus standardized protocols and processes must be determined and shared. For the data generated, several procedures were defined. A minimum metadata profile related to the sampling event is required for all projects, which follows existing standards including the DarwinCore (https://dwc.tdwg.org). Sample preparation was also standardized based primarily on protocols developed in earlier projects that were validated for use in Ecobiomics, for example the Earth Microbiome Project (http://www.earthmicrobiome.org). The procedures for DNA extraction through sequencing largely followed the Minimum Information about “X” Sequence (MIxS) standard (gensc.org/mixs). This data is all input into an in-house custom-built software package, Sequence Database (SeqDB) used by all participants across the entire project, which is made available centrally via a federal high-performance computing centre. SeqDB not only stores the metadata and data generated but also maintains provenance based on defined workflows for metabarcoding, shotgun metagenomics, and other “omics” pipelines. It also supports project management through various metrics and visualizations. We will document some of the challenges to standardizing data and workflows in large multi-domain and multi-department project like Ecobiomics and the need for further standard development to truly support data sharing and integration across a highly diverse ecosystem of genomic observatories globally.

Smart Citizen Kit and Station: An open environmental monitoring system for citizen participation and scientific experimentation

Abstract In the past years, multiple research projects have explored the potential of low-cost environmental sensors for urban air pollution monitoring. However, each project has taken its own independent and in many cases, fully or partially closed approach. We present the Smart Citizen System, a flexible, easy-to-use and fully open-source environmental monitoring solution for particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, noise levels, and many other indicators. The use of low-cost sensors in recent years has been generally approached in two different ways citizen science and educational activities, where the primary purpose is to engage citizens in the measurement process and raise awareness of environmental concerns; and a more sophisticated scientific approach, where the main aim is to study the potentiality of the low-cost sensing technologies. The Smart Citizen System balances modularity with integration to fulfil both needs by providing an extendable solution, with different ranges of sensors based on the same core components. With that aim, two solutions have been developed: the Smart Citizen Kit, intended for citizen science and awareness activities; and the Smart Citizen Station, designed to serve as a more complex and accurate set of air pollution sensors. The design is based on the principle of reproducibility, also integrating non-hardware components such as a dedicated storage platform and a sensor analysis framework. The core system bases its sensing capabilities in widely reviewed low-cost sensors and aims to provide a robust framework for environmental monitoring activities. By making everything open, from the hardware to the software platform or the sensor post-processing algorithms, we hope others might find it useful as a development platform allowing them to focus on their project particular needs instead of reinventing everything from the ground-up.

Ecological Monitoring of Specially Protected Natural Areas of the Russian Arctic

active industrial development of the Russian Arctic leads to the increase of anthropogenic pressure on natural ecosystems. One of the main ways to preserve unique territories is the establishment of special regimes for natural resources use and environmental protection, including monitoring of environmental pollution. The creation of network of integrated environmental monitoring in specially protected natural areas will allow studying the environmental response to anthropogenic impact, as well as monitoring the biosphere in places distant from production activity. The conducted analysis of environmental threats, and ongoing environmental monitoring activities, has shown the need to establish programs for environmental monitoring in specially protected natural areas. In the long term, monitoring components will be integrated into a single network that will provide information for assessing the effectiveness of environmental measures; data on the dynamics of natural processes. This network is supposed to help identify the most vulnerable components of the biosphere as well.

Comprehensive biodiversity analysis via ultra-deep patterned flow cell technology: a case study of eDNA metabarcoding seawater

The characterization of biodiversity is a crucial element of ecological investigations as well as environmental assessment and monitoring activities. Increasingly, amplicon-based environmental DNA metabarcoding (alternatively, marker gene metagenomics) is used for such studies given its ability to provide biodiversity data from various groups of organisms simply from analysis of bulk environmental samples such as water, soil or sediments. The Illumina MiSeq is currently the most popular tool for carrying out this work, but we set out to determine whether typical studies were reading enough DNA to detect rare organisms (i.e., those that may be of greatest interest such as endangered or invasive species) present in the environment. We collected sea water samples along two transects in Conception Bay, Newfoundland and analyzed them on the MiSeq with a sequencing depth of 100,000 reads per sample (exceeding the 60,000 per sample that is typical of similar studies). We then analyzed these same samples on Illumina’s newest high-capacity platform, the NovaSeq, at a depth of 7 million reads per sample. Not surprisingly, the NovaSeq detected many more taxa than the MiSeq thanks to its much greater sequencing depth. However, contrary to our expectations this pattern was true even in depth-for-depth comparisons. In other words, the NovaSeq can detect more DNA sequence diversity within samples than the MiSeq, even at the exact same sequencing depth. Even when samples were reanalyzed on the MiSeq with a sequencing depth of 1 million reads each, the MiSeq’s ability to detect new sequences plateaued while the NovaSeq continued to detect new sequence variants. These results have important biological implications. The NovaSeq found 40% more metazoan families in this environment than the MiSeq, including some of interest such as marine mammals and bony fish so the real-world implications of these findings are significant. These results are most likely associated to the advances incorporated in the NovaSeq, especially a patterned flow cell, which prevents similar sequences that are neighbours on the flow cell (common in metabarcoding studies) from being erroneously merged into single spots by the sequencing instrument. This study sets the stage for incorporating eDNA metabarcoding in comprehensive analysis of oceanic samples in a wide range of ecological and environmental investigations.