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Crowdsourcing eDNA for biodiversity monitoring: Interview with Kristy Deiner

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What do lakes tell us about life on the land surrounding it? When environmental DNA scientist Kristy Deiner and her team started thinking about this question, the answer seemed evident: probably a lot. Rivers flow through landscapes and end up in lakes or the oceans. Along the way, they collect and carry with them traces of the DNA, or environmental DNA (eDNA), of the biodiversity that lives in the catchment. “It became clear that lakes are eDNA hotspots, and that we could go and get this large-scale information and understand more about biodiversity on Earth,” Deiner, assistant professor at the department of environmental systems science at ETH Zurich, told Mongabay in a video interview. The big question, she said, was, “Does the DNA that we expect on the landscape actually get into the lake?” To test this hypothesis, Deiner and her team decided that it was imperative to get samples from lakes all over the world, spanning different types of ecosystems. “We realized we needed to rely on other people throughout the world,” she said. “So we came up with the idea of getting people to do it on a single day.” They launched LeDNA, a project that worked with citizen scientists to gather environmental DNA samples from 500 lakes in 80 countries around the world. The samples were collected on May 22 to commemorate the United Nations-declared International Day for Biological Diversity.  “People care about what’s going on,” Deiner said. “So let’s harness that. There’s no reason why that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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