Anthropogenic activities not only alter community composition, but also the ways species interact. This is particularly pertinent in the case of aquatic bacteria, where key processes and functions (e.g. nutrient cycling) are performed as a consortium of interacting taxa. An increasingly common approach for examining and visualising the intra-interactions within complex biological communities is by co-occurrence networks. In this review, we provide an overview of bacterial co-occurrence networks and their properties and propose how these may be used as a biomonitoring tool for aquatic systems.

Knowing when and where plants are accessing and using groundwater is a major challenge for water managers. Here we propose a new method, using environmental DNA (eDNA) as an indicator of plant groundwater use. If successful, such an indicator would be highly beneficial to water management and may also improve the conversation of groundwater-dependent ecosystems.

Sediment DNA-based approaches for monitoring benthic biota are democratising but their large-scale implementation remains limited by the use of expensive and time-consuming commercial DNA extraction kits. We assessed the reliability of a quick and cheap extracellular DNA extraction method for characterising sediment communities for biomonitoring purposes. This approach provides consistent biodiversity patterns, making it a promising alternative for the ecological assessment of aquatic environments.