Biology subjects

Haring, E.

Publications and source records attributed to Haring, E..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

How to catch flies in the city (fast): Citizen Science on Drosophila ecology helps to raise awareness for biodiversity in urban environments

To efficiently mitigate biodiversity loss both robust ecological data and broader societal engagement are needed. Citizen science offers a pathway to address these dual challenges by combining data collection with public involvement. Here, we introduce the citizen science project Vienna City Fly, conducted at the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHMW), which used fruit flies (Drosophila) as a model organism group for urban biodiversity research and public engagement. Participants deployed standardized traps across Vienna, enabling systematic sampling and active participation in research, which resulted in hundreds of fly collections, thousands of sampled fly specimens and new insights into the biodiversity and ecology of the collected fly species, demonstrating the feasibility of large-scale ecological research through public collaboration. To assess motivational drivers and perceived impacts of participation, we conducted an online survey (N=59) using the validated psychometric MORFEN-CS scale. Survey results revealed that nature conservation values and the intention to contribute to biodiversity conservation emerged as the strongest drivers of engagement, complemented by sociopolitical responsibility and citizen science-based motivations. Reported outcomes include knowledge gain (61%), more positive attitude toward study organisms (50%), and increased awareness of biodiversity (30%). Satisfaction was very high, with 85% rating their experience at the top of the scale and all participants expressing willingness to join future citizen science projects. Recruitment occurred mainly via social networks, and the sample of participants was highly educated, indicating limits to inclusivity and reach. Our findings demonstrate that citizen science can contribute to robust ecological data collection while gaining knowledge and awareness. Natural history museums, as trusted institutions, play a key role in facilitating such initiatives. Overall, Drosophila research proves to be a suitable field for citizen science, combining accessibility with strong potential for advancing ecological and biodiversity research as well as public engagement in urban biodiversity research.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2025

Ecology and temporal dynamics of urban Drosophila species communities as potential indicators of biodiversity decline

Understanding the impact of ecological factors on biodiversity is central in the context of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. Urban areas, as landscapes under particularly strong anthropogenic influence, are undergoing rapid ecological change, yet the consequences for urban biodiversity and ecosystem functioning remain poorly understood. In this study, we focused on fruit flies of the genus Drosophila - a diverse group of dipterans with variable ecological niches and degrees of synanthropy - to investigate species composition and community ecology in the metropolitan area of Vienna, Austria. With the help of numerous citizen scientists, we have collected approximately 18,000 specimens through dense spatio-temporal sampling both indoors and outdoors of human dwellings. A total of 13 Drosophila species were identified, with communities dominated by widespread cosmopolitan synanthropic species. Among these, D. mercatorum and D. virilis represent novel records for Austria. Comparisons to a previous study from more than 30 years ago revealed that the species richness in Vienna was more than 50% lower than before and showed that formerly common species were potentially replaced by neobiots. We further assessed ecological niches by intersecting species abundance data with high-dimensional, high-resolution earth observation datasets, which revealed distinct ecological preferences among species. In particular, the neozoan D. mercatorum emerged as a highly synanthropic species, tightly confined to urban areas with high levels of imperviousness. In summary, our study underpins the versatility of the Drosophila system as indicators of biodiversity loss in a rapidly changing world.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

AmpliPiper: A versatile amplicon-seq analysis tool for multilocus DNA barcoding

The advent of third generation sequencing technology has revolutionized parallelized sequencing of DNA fragments of varying lengths, such as PCR amplicons, which provides unprecedented new opportunities for large-scale and diverse DNA barcoding projects that, for example, aim to quantify the accelerating biodiversity crisis. However, the broad-scale application of these new technologies for biodiversity research is often hindered by the demand for advanced bioinformatics skills to carry out quantitative analyses. To facilitate the application of multilocus amplicon sequencing (amplicon-seq) data for biodiversity and integrative taxonomic research questions, we present AmpliPiper, an automated and user-friendly software pipeline which carries out bioinformatics analyses of multilocus amplicon-seq data generated with Oxford Nanopore (ONT) sequencing. AmpliPiper combines analysis methods for DNA barcoding data that include demultiplexing of pooled amplicon-seq data, haplotype-specific consensus sequence reconstruction, species identification based on comparison to the BOLD and GenBank databases, phylogenetic analyses and species delimitation. We demonstrate the applicability and workflow of our approach based on a newly generated dataset of 14 hoverfly (Syrphidae) samples that were amplified and sequenced at four marker genes. We further benchmark our approach with Sanger sequencing and simulated amplicon-seq data which show that DNA barcoding with ONT is both accurate and sensitive to detect even subtle genetic variation.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2023

Historic museum samples provide evidence for a recent replacement of Wolbachia types in European Drosophila melanogaster.

Wolbachia is one of the most common bacterial endosymbionts, which is frequently found in numerous arthropods and nematode taxa. Wolbachia infections can have a strong influence on the evolutionary dynamics of their hosts since these bacteria are reproductive manipulators that affect the fitness and life history of their host species for their own benefit. Host-symbiont interactions with Wolbachia are perhaps best studied in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, which is naturally infected with five different types among which wMel and wMelCS are the most frequent ones. Comparisons of infection types between natural flies and long-term lab stocks have previously indicated that wMelCS represents the ancestral type, which was only very recently replaced by the nowadays dominant wMel in most natural populations. In this study, we took advantage of recently sequenced museum specimens of D. melanogaster that have been collected 90-200 years ago in Northern Europe to test this hypothesis. Our comparison to contemporary Wolbachia samples provides compelling support for the replacement hypothesis and identifies potential infections with yet unknown Wolbachia types of supergroup B. Our analyses show that sequencing data from historic museum specimens and their bycatch are an emerging and unprecedented resource to address fundamental questions about evolutionary dynamics in host-symbiont interactions.

evolutionary biology↗