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Europe’s water law needs genomic resolution

Nature Water volume 3, pages 963–964 (2025)Cite this article

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Europe’s lakes have become real-time dashboards of anthropogenic pressure1 and climate change2. Warmer waters, prolonged heat waves, microplastic loads, pesticide pulses, and invasive mussels carpeting the shallows all converge on a single linchpin of lake health: phytoplankton. These microscopic drifters can dictate whether water remains clear and potable or turns turbid and toxic, whether a basin locks away carbon or vents greenhouse gases3. Yet a key parameter on which regulators rely — phytoplankton diversity, the metric safeguarding drinking water for more than 180 million Europeans — still hinges on an inverted-microscope technique devised in 1958, the year the first integrated circuit was soldered. The Utermöhl settling protocol — now standardized as CEN EN 15204:2006 and embedded in Annex V of the EU Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) — remains the backbone of official lake-health assessment.

However, this mid-20th-century method is faltering under 21st-century pressures. Sedimentation chambers sit idle in national laboratories, while veteran taxonomists retire faster than replacements can be trained — and those who remain rarely concur. Repeated intercalibration trials reveal that analyst-to-analyst variability is now the single largest source of error4. By the time a sample finally reaches the microscope — often days to weeks after collection — it may already be too late to react. Worse, morphology alone gives no warning: the toxic phytoplankton Prymnesium parvum, which in 2022 killed over 300 tonnes of fish (and myriad other organisms) in the Oder River5, looks identical to harmless or low-toxicity strains. As ever-longer, warmer stratified seasons grant such opportunists free rein, they glide past a checklist drawn up for cooler, more stable times.

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Fig. 1: Cloud-native genomics brings real-time lake surveillance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Limnological Station, Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of Zurich, Kilchberg, Switzerland

    Adrian-Stefan Andrei & Jakob Pernthaler

  2. Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany

    Hans-Peter Grossart

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  1. Adrian-Stefan Andrei
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  2. Hans-Peter Grossart
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  3. Jakob Pernthaler
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Correspondence to Adrian-Stefan Andrei.

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Andrei, AS., Grossart, HP. & Pernthaler, J. Europe’s water law needs genomic resolution. Nat Water 3, 963–964 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00488-7

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