At a sunny weekend in July, the “DNA macht Schule” team participated in the “Tag der lebendigen Lippe” in Datteln. For the first time, the EGLV invited researchers to the Lippe river (instead of the Emscher river) for assessing its biodiversity and offering participatory activities for interested citizens. We are happy about the many visitors that played pairs, tried out the field and lab work, and got first insights into the Lippe river biodiversity with our DNA macht Schule App. We are looking forward to new registration for the next school year.

We were invited to present our project at the BMUKN in Berlin to the general public as well as to Carsten Schneider, the Federal Minister of the Environment. We were able to share information about our project, the potential of environmental DNA analyses, and results from an eDNA analysis of the Spree River conducted specifically for this day. We are especially happy that many children tried out the individual steps of the eDNA analysis with our portable lab! In this regard we would like to thank the UDE working groups Environmental Metagenomics and Biodiversity for their help with live sequencing.

We were delighted to welcome alumni and current lab members to celebrate the successful completion of 10 years of AG Leese (Aquatic Ecosystem Research) at UDE. The celebration brought together many familiar faces from the past decade for an evening of reconnecting, shared memories, and looking back on the lab’s journey.

With games, a grill party, and nostalgic videos from the last ten years, the event created a lively and warm atmosphere that highlighted the strong community built around the lab over the years.

Florian Leese, Arne Beermann and MT Werner travelled to the Biodiversity Monitoring Week to present the projects DNAquaIMG, dbDNA and DNA macht Schule. It was an intense but great time with many talks, posters, and workshops. It was nice to meet so many people! We are looking forward to the BioMonWeek 2028 in Turku, Finland!