IceLab affiliate Per Stenberg, Associate professor at the Department of Ecology, Environment and Geoscience, will give a talk in IceLab titled 'Monitoring ecosystem dynamics through air'' on June 17th at 14:00, in IceLab and through Zoom.
A fundamental challenge for understanding ecosystem responses to ongoing environmental changes, and for biodiversity conservation measures to succeed, lies in our ability to more comprehensively monitor the diversity of organisms over space and time. The ultimate goal would be to have a method that continuously measure abundances for all organisms in an area using a low-effort sampling procedure. We have now for the first time showed that biodiversity surveillance of entire ecosystems is indeed possible, by analyzing eDNA from an air monitoring sample archive in northern Sweden. By using non-targeted sequencing of the total DNA pool (shotgun sequencing) we avoid many of the shortcomings of previous studies, which have inherent biases and low taxonomic resolution. We have generated data from almost 400 weekly air samples, covering more than three decades, producing one of the largest eDNA timeseries datasets (and more data is underway). The very large quantities of air sampled, extensive sequencing, novel analysis strategies, and reconstruction of particle catchment areas, allow us to reliably track abundances of >2,700 genera from all domains of life and from most types of environments. We validate our reconstructed trends by demonstrating a striking correlation with external monitoring data as well as known phenology, such as flowering times of plants and sporulation times of fungi. We find that climatic conditions predicted short-term variation but not multiannual or directional abundance trends. Rather, we find a drastic biodiversity decline that coincides with changes in forest tree composition driven by changes in landscape scale forest management. Other currently ongoing and planned projects based on this data will also briefly be presented.
Drop in to IceLab (find using MazeMap) or join via Zoom: IceLab Living Room Zoom 612 568 7586 https://umu.zoom.us/my/icelabcouch
