BioTechAPS contributes to understanding interdependencies between agricultural practices and their impacts on biodiversity in order to help secure reliable and healthy food resources. Novel monitoring technologies will be applied in sunflowers to assess and promote biodiversity associated with drought-tolerant hybrids. Methods include conventional sampling of pollinators combined with morphology-based species identification, compared to eDNA collection and metabarcoding. High-throughput metabarcoding is currently being optimized for use in sunflower assessment. Outcomes on samples from different blooming periods are used to show the suitability of the approach for next-generation biodiversity assessment in agricultural landscapes. To achieve this, services of the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops, Novi Sad, Serbia, and European Marine Biological Resource Centre, France, are being provided for field experiments and metabarcoding procedures, respectively

Project duration: July 2024 – December 2024.

Financed by: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Grant Agreement No. 101058020 (AgroServ)