Water quality is vital for maintaining ecosystems and human existence. However, it is threatened by the presence of microplastics. The “PlastoView” project is dedicated to developing innovative image-based methods for monitoring both, micrororganisms like plankton and microplastics. These methods will be implemented in a novel, cost-effective mobile system.

Biodiversity is one of the most important components for the functioning of global ecosystems and represents the basis for the existence and future of mankind. Nevertheless, so far only about 10-20% of all species are known and their function in the ecosystem described. In close cooperation with the Center for Integrative Biodiversity Discovery at the Museum of Natural History Berlin, new methods are being developed to digitize large insect collections and automatically determine their species. In this way, changes in the ecosystem can be detected.

A fully automated sorting robot for small insects is developed in close cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Evolutionary and Biodiversity Research in Berlin, that can classify and sort 14 different insects using machine learning methods. The quantification of insects from collected trap samples is necessary to identify threatened insect species and to take appropriate preventive measures.

Open Science software is developed to analyze parameters of zebrafish heartbeat such as: heart rate, rhythmicity, fractional shortening and heart wall thickness automatically from videos of zebrafish hearts.