Global measure of biodiversity by understanding biogeochemical cycling of environmental DNA in lakes

2026-07-22

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 is 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. I will 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. I am among the first to show that DNA shed from animals into the environment (‘eDNA’) is transported in rivers (10-12 km) and that it is from aquatic and terrestrial species. Building on these observations, I hypothesize that transported eDNA allows for sampling multiple species on large spatial scales and will test my hypothesis by determining if lakes act as accumulators of eDNA in the landscape by receiving transported eDNA from rivers. Thus, my proposed research will investigate (1) how chemical, physical, and biotic processes cause eDNA decay to understand its transport potential in the environment, (2) how much eDNA from a catchment is transported into a lake, and (3) in a global set of lakes, test whether eDNA measures seasonal turnover of biodiversity for large spatial scales. 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 to understand what effect their change has on the biosphere.

Switzerland

2026-02-01