Samenvatting

The biodiversity in the Netherlands is at an all-time low, in 2020 this was at a level of 15% especially while compared to Europe’s average of 40%. The biggest cause for this is intensive agriculture and lack of livable space for a wide variety of plants and animals. In the agricultural sector this is a consequence of the heavy use of manure to fertilize the acre’s and keeping the water level of nearby trenches as low as possible. At the moment not much is known of the long-term recovery of biodiversity. The aim of this study is to use multiple environmental-OMICS techniques to develop an early warning system, by determining a metabolic fingerprint for acre and monitoring these over time with different conditions. By doing this it should be possible to link changes in the biodiversity at the chemical level. This thesis focuses it on the E-metabolomics part, by developing an untargeted method using GC-MS to determine these changing fingerprints of these acre’s overtime. To achieve this is important to know what kind of metabolites these soil samples consist of and how to develop and validate a fitting method to measures these, using the available systems.