We conduct hypothesis- and theory-driven research on the responses of microbial and invertebrate communities, food webs and ecosystem functions to anthropogenic stressors, with a strong emphasis on toxicants. Our general aim is to understand, and thereby expand our capacity to predict, how ecosystems respond to human influence and in particular how toxicant-driven biochemical changes in organisms propagate up to the level of ecosystems. Our research relies on a wide range of methods including molecular (e.g. barcoding, metabarcoding), physiological (e.g. enzyme analysis, fatty acid analysis), ecological (e.g. traits, metapopulations), modelling (e.g. meta-population/community modelling, machine learning, geospatial analysis) and chemical (e.g. sediment and water extraction, analysis for organic toxicants, stable isotopes) methods.