Scentscapes: What do healthy ecosystems smell like?

Develop a novel approach for assessing ecosystem health by analysing its bVOCs profile, or ‘scentscape’

Ecosystem health refers to the capacity of an ecosystem to maintain its structure, function, and resilience over time while continuing to provide essential services for both humans and the environment. With the widespread degradation of nature and decline in ecosystem services, restoring ecosystem health has become a global policy and management priority. However, effective restoration depends on having repeatable, quantitative methods to assess the baseline state of an ecosystem, track changes, and evaluate the impact of interventions.

Current monitoring approaches—including species surveys, acoustic monitoring, environmental DNA, and satellite imaging—offer valuable insights but are often time-consuming, expensive, or difficult to deploy widely. There is a pressing need for faster, accessible field tools to assess ecological condition and support responsive management.

This project introduces a novel concept: using the scentscape of an ecosystem—the mixture of biogenic volatile organic compounds (bVOCs) it emits—as a rapid chemical fingerprint of ecological health. bVOCs are released by plants, soils, and microbes in response to biological activity and environmental stress. Their composition can change within minutes to hours in response to pressures such as drought, land degradation, or disease, making them potentially powerful indicators of the state of an ecosystem’s health and the impact of changes.

Our project has two  aims: (1) to test whether scentscapes can reliably indicate different states of ecosystem degradation and recovery, and (2) to develop a low-cost, portable sensor based on aldehyde-specific nanopore technology to detect key bVOCs in the field.

We will evaluate this approach across three UK ecosystem types of high conservation and societal value—peatlands, agricultural soils, and forests—which face significant threats from drying, overuse, and disease, respectively.

Fieldwork will be conducted at established UK sites where degradation gradients and restoration measures are already being studied:

• Peatlands: Assessing bVOC emissions from drying versus rewetted sites at Buccleuch Estates, Scotland.
• Agricultural soils: Comparing bVOC emissions across 10 regenerative farming plots under different management schemes at FarmED, Oxfordshire.
• Forests: Monitoring bVOC emissions from trees and surrounding landscapes which contain varying levels of Phytophthora spp. disease at Forest Research sites,  Edinburgh.

These field sites will allow us to determine the potential of bVOCs to provide a quick and quantitative assessment of peatland degradation, soil quality, and disease (from Phytophthora infestation) of forests, and recovery following mitigation measures such as rewetting, regenerative agricultural practices, and disease control.

We will use two complementary approaches to characterise scentscapes. First, we will employ gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to generate detailed chemical profiles of bVOCs in each environment. Second, we will develop and test a novel portable nanopore-based sensor targeting aldehydes—a group of bVOCs shown in our pilot data to be especially informative for ecosystem diagnostics. Originally designed for human breath analysis, nanopore technology can distinguish closely related aldehydes in complex mixtures. We will adapt and calibrate this technology to detect key bVOCs associated with ecosystem condition and integrate it into a handheld MinION device for field trials.

This high-risk, high-reward project merges ecological science, analytical chemistry, and nanopore sensor engineering to establish a new paradigm in environmental monitoring: real-time, scent-based diagnostics. If successful, it will deliver a rapid, scalable, and low-cost method for assessing ecosystem health—providing land managers, conservationists, and policy-makers with a transformative tool to guide restoration and enhance long-term environmental resilience in the UK and beyond.