LeDNA

The global loss and redistribution of biodiversity is a hallmark of the Anthropocene. Our challenge is to generate information about how altered biodiversity influences ecosystems and use this information to change our impact on the biosphere. To meet this challenge, we must know where species are, how their distributions change in time and why. However, current methods for determining species distributions are expensive, time intensive and hard to do for multiple species and large geographic regions-​ rendering global trend analysis near infeasible. We therefore need a paradigm shift. In this project we utilize the biotechnology of the fourth industrial revolution (i.e., inexpensive sequencing and computational power) to empirically change how we sample animal and plant biodiversity to solve the infeasibility problem of tracking multiple species distributions on large spatial scales. We are testing if lakes act as accumulators of eDNA in the landscape by receiving transported eDNA from rivers. If lakes accumulate eDNA from their catchments, sampling them will provide the paradigm shift needed to vastly change the cost, speed and geographic scale with which species can be surveyed through time.