The urgent need for robust, high-throughput method to assess water quality and aquatic biodiversity, as a proxy for environmental health, are clear. This provides an obvious target for initial efforts resolving molecular fingerprints for total diversity and identification of potential indicator organisms. Eukaryotes exhibit a significant level of morphological diversity that has traditionally been used to define Linnean names. Molecular systematics provides a separate and powerful tool for phylogenetic analysis but does not link easily to the system of Linnean names, especially for environmental molecular studies. This project seeks to provide Dr Gong with an array of molecular skills to compliment his expertise in ecology and traditional systematics that will position him to lead a research group to address this problem.