Monitoring the status of African wetlands using macroinvertebrates and parasites with traditional and modern tools: balancing ecosystem and societal needs

Abstract

Inland waters and their biodiversity represent a vital natural resource with profound economic, cultural, aesthetic, scientific, and educational value. Yet freshwater biodiversity is declining at a rate far exceeding that of terrestrial or marine ecosystems. Addressing this crisis requires holistic frameworks such as the One Health paradigm, which links the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems and considers how communities perceive the connection between nature and well-being. In rapidly growing communities across Sub-Saharan Africa, lakes, rivers, and wetlands are indispensable sources of water and livelihoods, yet these systems face escalating pressures from climate change and anthropogenic exploitation. Ensuring their sustainable management requires robust, continuous monitoring protocols that reflect biological, environmental, and social realities. The AfroWetMaP project applies this integrated perspective by combining parasitological insights with bioindicator-based assessments of ecosystem health focusing on wetlands in Central Africa. By incorporating parasites and their macroinvertebrate hosts into water quality monitoring, AfroWetMaP promotes a more ecologically comprehensive and One Health–aligned strategy for ecosystem and public health management. Central to this effort is the co-production of knowledge with local stakeholders. AfroWetMaP advocates for coordinated, One Health–driven action to safeguard Africa’s freshwater ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. Freshwater macroinvertebrate communities are widely used to assess wetland ecosystem health, and AfroWetMaP aims to refine these methods through improved barcoding protocols to enable reliable eDNA-based monitoring. To support this development, we present a comprehensive review of the freshwater invertebrate fauna of the Lake Tanganyika region, one of the world’s most species-rich freshwater systems and a classic natural laboratory for evolutionary and limnological research. Our synthesis reveals a profound knowledge gap: more than 50% species have been recorded only once, rarefaction curves fail to reach a plateau across all major taxa, and baseline data needed, for biomonitoring such as species distribution along the environmental gradient remain critically incomplete. High taxonomic resolution is essential in such diverse systems, yet current limitations hinder the deployment of non-invasive, high-throughput approaches like eDNA. These findings underscore the urgent need for integrated monitoring frameworks, enhanced taxonomic research, and sustained capacity building in biodiversity-rich regions under intense anthropogenic pressure. This project will develop the Multi-Resolution Wetland Biomonitoring Index (MRWI), a validated framework to determine the threshold in increased taxonomic resolution of macroinvertebrate indicators and molecular tools improving detection power of disturbance. By benchmarking ecological signal strength across multiple levels of taxonomic resolution accompanied by molecular-based detection, MRWI will support evidence-based decisions on how tropical wetland monitoring programmes can achieve reliable ecological assessment while remaining operationally realistic.