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These startups are using traces of DNA to spy on nature for good—and profit

News Feed
Monday, April 15, 2024

In 2010, Noah Wilson-Rich was juggling several jobs while earning his PhD in biology at Tufts University: He taught classes at several nearby universities, and one day a week, tended bar at a cafe in the lobby of the Hult International Business School. On one of his shifts, he overheard customers discussing a competition for entrepreneurs. The next day, he entered, pitching a company that would gather insect health data at beehives. “They were like, ‘The bartender won?’ said Wilson-Rich. “Okay, you all need to respect your service workers.” Two thousand dollars in prize money helped Wilson-Rich launch The Best Bees Company. Now, more than a decade later, Best Bees offers corporate and residential beekeeping services near two dozen U.S. cities. The company also charges up to $450 for a “HoneyDNA” kit, which uses environmental DNA, or eDNA—genetic information deposited by a wide range of organisms in the surrounding environment—to test a hive’s health, or simply provide information about the “terroir” of the honey, said Wilson-Rich. The kit, which the company started selling in 2015, includes a sample bottle and a prepaid envelope; upon receipt, Best Bees sends honey samples out to a lab for sequencing to reveal what plant DNA is found in a hive’s product. The results can indicate whether the bees have been feeding on lavender, or how far they’re traveling from the hive; the company also provides corporate sustainability impact reporting. Best Bees is one of the many companies carving out a niche in a commercial landscape increasingly focused on advertising environmental responsibility, pushed by both customer demand and regulatory requirements. Testing environmental DNA, which allows data to be gathered from the tiny pieces of skin, scales, and slime that species shed as they move through the world, has been framed as a cheap and efficient way to understand a corporation’s impact. As supporters lobby for regulatory acceptance, a group of large consulting companies and eDNA specialists see the tool as a promising way to monitor corporate sustainability, like measuring the success of conservation efforts or the possible effects of a new bridge or parking lot. Experts say eDNA has limitations and drawbacks. So far, it appears that the tool is best used as one tool among a suite of monitoring methods, so it’s unlikely the technology will completely disrupt the environmental consulting industry, which according to The Insight Partners, a market research firm, was valued at more than $34 billion globally in 2020. But eDNA has undoubtedly created new opportunities to gather and monetize data. Meanwhile, both company representatives and researchers say it’s still early days in understanding all its possible capabilities and applications; some, like Wilson-Rich, are devising completely novel ways to sell eDNA services.  “It’s not just science for science’s sake,” said Ryan Kelly, an ecologist and legal scholar at the University of Washington, who works with government agencies on ecosystem management. “We’re making tools that it seems pretty clear can answer questions that haven’t been asked before, or can help people do their jobs better, cheaper, and faster.”  Often, before any huge infrastructure project can be constructed, governments and regulators require companies to prove they aren’t disturbing the natural landscape where the project would be built. The companies running those assessments, some of them large international corporations, have become an industry unto themselves: By 2028, the environmental consulting market is forecast to reach $50 billion in value, according to The Insight Partners. eDNA has the potential to make the work of those companies much easier, and much cheaper.   Traditional environmental monitoring “can be quite a laborious process,” according to Nicole Fahner, executive director at CEGA, an eDNA research and development center, and eDNAtec, a Canadian eDNA company. Such monitoring can require teams of highly trained biologists and ecologists, at times dispersed across sweeping landscapes like deserts and dense forests to set up traps, cameras, and remote sensing equipment. In lakes, streams, or reservoirs, scientists sometimes stick an electrified rod into the water to stun fish, to identify and count them. Surveys may happen multiple times over a series of months. And based on when a species is likely to appear, surveys may be conducted under the cover of night.  Surveys are even more challenging in parts of the deep ocean where some offshore wind and oil prospectors are eyeing projects, Fahner said, because the depths are difficult to reach and some are home to species that have never been identified and cataloged.  To meet regulatory requirements, environmental monitoring consulting is “worth a lot of money as an industry,” said Kelly. “If they could do it in a way that was more efficient and more powerful, they would.” Purveyors of environmental DNA prize its efficiency. eDNA sampling requires fewer people collecting air, dirt, or water in cheap bottles or vials. Much of the work happens back at the lab, where companies extract DNA from samples, sequence it, and then enter the results in a database to identify species matches. eDNA tests can locate a specific species, like an endangered animal or an invasive plant, or provide a picture of an entire ecosystem. And researchers are deploying methods that allow for live sequencing in the field. Today, according to industry experts, the most well-established use of eDNA for species monitoring is tracking of the great crested newt, an amphibian native to Europe and legally protected in the United Kingdom. Traditional surveys to track the newt required four night missions—one in each season—to trap specimens under plastic bottles, with a return in the morning to count them. For the last several years, biodiversity monitoring companies have used environmental DNA instead. Surveyors can scoop up water at any time of day and the DNA isolated can signal if newts are present, saving both time and labor.  “It all comes down to that value proposition: What is the advantage of using eDNA over other methods?” said Andrew Weeks, technical director at EnviroDNA, an Australian eDNA company that Weeks believes was the first to operate in the country. In 2008, Gregg Schumer was working at a highly secure Canadian microbiology lab. His days were spent harvesting animal tissue and testing it for viral DNA from pathogens like Ebola. At the time, a childhood friend was the principal scientist at a consulting company that was tracking the Delta smelt, an endangered fish usually less than three inches long, in California waterways.  “We began talking,” said Schumer, “and realized that my searching for viruses in organ systems was not unlike trying to find a really small fish in a very big system, and that we could use the exact same technique.” Soon, the two started sampling water from the same California rivers they grew up fishing, analyzing the samples for smelt DNA. In 2009, that work gave rise to one of the earliest environmental DNA companies: Genidaqs.  Genidaqs got its first grant soon after eDNA entered academic parlance. In 2008, researchers in France proposed a “novel approach” to detect species from aquatic samples, amplifying short sequences of DNA and matching it to a species of frog. That paper is recognized as the first to recommend eDNA to monitor species, but the general concept has been around for much longer, Schumer said. “The term eDNA, for use in ecological or pathogen-detection applications, in that context, is relatively new,” he said. “But people have been pulling DNA out of the environment ever since they knew that DNA existed.”  The commercial eDNA landscape rose up soon after the French paper was published, with companies like Genidaqs, pronounced genetics, and SPYGEN, a French company that in 2011 rolled out of the lab that produced that original paper.  Many eDNA companies have sprouted from academic labs or research settings, after biologists and geneticists familiar with DNA sequencing saw an opening to use the tool to pull more information from uncontrolled settings like rivers. Most companies are relatively young; only in the past few years, Schumer said, has there been enough interest for a company to exist on eDNA-related business alone.  Large international consulting companies, including Jacobs and Stantec, now also offer environmental DNA services to clients, but sequencing is still largely carried out at a handful of corporate and academic labs. “There’s not very many commercial labs that do environmental DNA work out there, and there’s even fewer that are dedicated towards it,” said Fahner at eDNAtec, founded by a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph in 2015.   Though eDNA services are becoming more in demand, regulations are most advanced in Europe, where England’s acceptance of eDNA tools to monitor great crested newts in 2014 “really changed things,” said Liz Allchin, global principal for biology and ecology at Jacobs. To date, Weeks and Kelly said, England appears to be the only country with a national, regulatory eDNA standard; in this case it provisions how eDNA can be used to monitor a specific species. Elsewhere, the legal landscape for eDNA methods remains a bit of a “wild west,” said Schumer.  There is international interest, though. In Canada, eDNAtec has collaborated with the government on a few projects; the country’s Science Advisory Secretariat has also created a guidance document on using eDNA in decision-making. Finland has a national eDNA strategy and Australia developed a national eDNA reference center. Japan maintains a biodiversity monitoring network that uses eDNA and the Danish Environmental Protection Agency uses the tool to monitor for aquatic invasive species. Beginning in 2016, the U.S. government eDNA working group has convened researchers and officials at least six times to discuss the state of eDNA research and how to integrate the tool into governmental work in areas such as invasive species or pollinator monitoring. Some U.S. agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have used eDNA testing. But no national strategy exists in the U.S., though some academics, including Kelly, have advocated for one.  Wide-ranging governmental acceptance of eDNA would mean a windfall for companies selling these tools. Without it, some companies and researchers are hesitant to estimate the market’s future size.  Meanwhile, companies like Best Bees are experimenting with applications outside of traditional environmental monitoring. Wilson-Rich has consulted on how certain honey producers can verify the origin of their product through the plant DNA it contains and sell it at a premium, similar to Manuka honey, a mainstay at health food stores. Sustainable fishery advocates have proposed monitoring for illegal fishing using eDNA. Biologists and engineers have deployed autonomous submersibles to trawl the ocean floor for eDNA that may lead to new drugs. And on farms, scientists have experimented with using eDNA to test soil health and identify pests.  eDNA data could eventually generate value on its own. Last year, BeZero Carbon, an agency that rates the quality of carbon credits, began testing the use of eDNA as a proxy to gauge ecosystem health by looking for changes in the makeup of microbial communities in response to environmental stressors. Its use “as a tool for capturing ecosystem characteristics,” the agency notes on its website, “could be an important step in the development of nature-based credits.” Biodiversity credits could one day be available to companies that demonstrate an improvement to the natural landscape. That credit market is nascent—and it’s already received criticism—but international interest is growing. By 2030, the biodiversity offsets and credit market could be worth over $160 billion, according to BloombergNEF. Measuring biodiversity is more difficult than other voluntary credit systems, like carbon credits, said BeZero Carbon’s chief science officer Nick Atkinson, because biodiversity is not defined by a single measure. eDNA results can be collected over time, demonstrating how an environment changes. “We need the tools and the techniques to be able to measure biodiversity, and eDNA is one of them,” said Atkinson. “It’s very useful.” Along with excitement, though, there is skepticism. Atkinson is quick to point out that eDNA is no “magic bullet.” As with any set of data, it is open to bias, said Kelly at the University of Washington: “It could be analyzed in a responsible way, or an irresponsible way.” Bioethicists also worry that, without regulation, eDNA could lead to serious privacy concerns if companies are not restricted on how they can use it or whether they’re able to sell the data they collect. The tool has other limitations. Environmental DNA currently can’t be used to determine abundance of a species, for instance. And in certain circumstances, eDNA tests can lead to false positives and negatives—a winged creature may pick up plant or animal DNA in a field and drop it in an unexpected place, like a parking lot, or a fish may swim through an area and leave very little DNA behind. “Usually when you don’t detect something, you can’t say it was absent, you can say it wasn’t detected,” said Fahner. “All tests have a limit.” Instead, eDNA may work best if used as “an early warning system” to guide further research, said Weeks. eDNA can provide a snapshot of a landscape and offer information on a wide area; then, those tests may still need to be followed up with catch surveys or field surveys.  “It’s like a hammer, you can pound a nail with it or you can smash your thumb. So, if it’s used correctly, in the right context, it does provide meaningful data that add value to what’s already being done,” said Schumer at Genidaqs. “That added value, that’s the business.” The challenge now, according to Weeks, is to prove that value without overpromising.  “It’s like any new technology: It’ll go through that innovation adoption curve, where you’ll have early adopters, you’ll have this weight of expectation of what it can provide,” he said. “Eventually, there will be some, probably, level of disillusionment, because it can’t actually supply some of the things that people thought it could.”  “The challenge for us, as people that provide the service in the industry,” he added, “is to make sure that weight of expectation never gets beyond what it really can do.”  This story was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In 2010, Noah Wilson-Rich was juggling several jobs while earning his PhD in biology at Tufts University: He taught classes at several nearby universities, and one day a week, tended bar at a cafe in the lobby of the Hult International Business School. On one of his shifts, he overheard customers discussing a competition for entrepreneurs. The next day, he entered, pitching a company that would gather insect health data at beehives. “They were like, ‘The bartender won?’ said Wilson-Rich. “Okay, you all need to respect your service workers.” Two thousand dollars in prize money helped Wilson-Rich launch The Best Bees Company. Now, more than a decade later, Best Bees offers corporate and residential beekeeping services near two dozen U.S. cities. The company also charges up to $450 for a “HoneyDNA” kit, which uses environmental DNA, or eDNA—genetic information deposited by a wide range of organisms in the surrounding environment—to test a hive’s health, or simply provide information about the “terroir” of the honey, said Wilson-Rich. The kit, which the company started selling in 2015, includes a sample bottle and a prepaid envelope; upon receipt, Best Bees sends honey samples out to a lab for sequencing to reveal what plant DNA is found in a hive’s product. The results can indicate whether the bees have been feeding on lavender, or how far they’re traveling from the hive; the company also provides corporate sustainability impact reporting. Best Bees is one of the many companies carving out a niche in a commercial landscape increasingly focused on advertising environmental responsibility, pushed by both customer demand and regulatory requirements. Testing environmental DNA, which allows data to be gathered from the tiny pieces of skin, scales, and slime that species shed as they move through the world, has been framed as a cheap and efficient way to understand a corporation’s impact. As supporters lobby for regulatory acceptance, a group of large consulting companies and eDNA specialists see the tool as a promising way to monitor corporate sustainability, like measuring the success of conservation efforts or the possible effects of a new bridge or parking lot. Experts say eDNA has limitations and drawbacks. So far, it appears that the tool is best used as one tool among a suite of monitoring methods, so it’s unlikely the technology will completely disrupt the environmental consulting industry, which according to The Insight Partners, a market research firm, was valued at more than $34 billion globally in 2020. But eDNA has undoubtedly created new opportunities to gather and monetize data. Meanwhile, both company representatives and researchers say it’s still early days in understanding all its possible capabilities and applications; some, like Wilson-Rich, are devising completely novel ways to sell eDNA services.  “It’s not just science for science’s sake,” said Ryan Kelly, an ecologist and legal scholar at the University of Washington, who works with government agencies on ecosystem management. “We’re making tools that it seems pretty clear can answer questions that haven’t been asked before, or can help people do their jobs better, cheaper, and faster.”  Often, before any huge infrastructure project can be constructed, governments and regulators require companies to prove they aren’t disturbing the natural landscape where the project would be built. The companies running those assessments, some of them large international corporations, have become an industry unto themselves: By 2028, the environmental consulting market is forecast to reach $50 billion in value, according to The Insight Partners. eDNA has the potential to make the work of those companies much easier, and much cheaper.   Traditional environmental monitoring “can be quite a laborious process,” according to Nicole Fahner, executive director at CEGA, an eDNA research and development center, and eDNAtec, a Canadian eDNA company. Such monitoring can require teams of highly trained biologists and ecologists, at times dispersed across sweeping landscapes like deserts and dense forests to set up traps, cameras, and remote sensing equipment. In lakes, streams, or reservoirs, scientists sometimes stick an electrified rod into the water to stun fish, to identify and count them. Surveys may happen multiple times over a series of months. And based on when a species is likely to appear, surveys may be conducted under the cover of night.  Surveys are even more challenging in parts of the deep ocean where some offshore wind and oil prospectors are eyeing projects, Fahner said, because the depths are difficult to reach and some are home to species that have never been identified and cataloged.  To meet regulatory requirements, environmental monitoring consulting is “worth a lot of money as an industry,” said Kelly. “If they could do it in a way that was more efficient and more powerful, they would.” Purveyors of environmental DNA prize its efficiency. eDNA sampling requires fewer people collecting air, dirt, or water in cheap bottles or vials. Much of the work happens back at the lab, where companies extract DNA from samples, sequence it, and then enter the results in a database to identify species matches. eDNA tests can locate a specific species, like an endangered animal or an invasive plant, or provide a picture of an entire ecosystem. And researchers are deploying methods that allow for live sequencing in the field. Today, according to industry experts, the most well-established use of eDNA for species monitoring is tracking of the great crested newt, an amphibian native to Europe and legally protected in the United Kingdom. Traditional surveys to track the newt required four night missions—one in each season—to trap specimens under plastic bottles, with a return in the morning to count them. For the last several years, biodiversity monitoring companies have used environmental DNA instead. Surveyors can scoop up water at any time of day and the DNA isolated can signal if newts are present, saving both time and labor.  “It all comes down to that value proposition: What is the advantage of using eDNA over other methods?” said Andrew Weeks, technical director at EnviroDNA, an Australian eDNA company that Weeks believes was the first to operate in the country. In 2008, Gregg Schumer was working at a highly secure Canadian microbiology lab. His days were spent harvesting animal tissue and testing it for viral DNA from pathogens like Ebola. At the time, a childhood friend was the principal scientist at a consulting company that was tracking the Delta smelt, an endangered fish usually less than three inches long, in California waterways.  “We began talking,” said Schumer, “and realized that my searching for viruses in organ systems was not unlike trying to find a really small fish in a very big system, and that we could use the exact same technique.” Soon, the two started sampling water from the same California rivers they grew up fishing, analyzing the samples for smelt DNA. In 2009, that work gave rise to one of the earliest environmental DNA companies: Genidaqs.  Genidaqs got its first grant soon after eDNA entered academic parlance. In 2008, researchers in France proposed a “novel approach” to detect species from aquatic samples, amplifying short sequences of DNA and matching it to a species of frog. That paper is recognized as the first to recommend eDNA to monitor species, but the general concept has been around for much longer, Schumer said. “The term eDNA, for use in ecological or pathogen-detection applications, in that context, is relatively new,” he said. “But people have been pulling DNA out of the environment ever since they knew that DNA existed.”  The commercial eDNA landscape rose up soon after the French paper was published, with companies like Genidaqs, pronounced genetics, and SPYGEN, a French company that in 2011 rolled out of the lab that produced that original paper.  Many eDNA companies have sprouted from academic labs or research settings, after biologists and geneticists familiar with DNA sequencing saw an opening to use the tool to pull more information from uncontrolled settings like rivers. Most companies are relatively young; only in the past few years, Schumer said, has there been enough interest for a company to exist on eDNA-related business alone.  Large international consulting companies, including Jacobs and Stantec, now also offer environmental DNA services to clients, but sequencing is still largely carried out at a handful of corporate and academic labs. “There’s not very many commercial labs that do environmental DNA work out there, and there’s even fewer that are dedicated towards it,” said Fahner at eDNAtec, founded by a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph in 2015.   Though eDNA services are becoming more in demand, regulations are most advanced in Europe, where England’s acceptance of eDNA tools to monitor great crested newts in 2014 “really changed things,” said Liz Allchin, global principal for biology and ecology at Jacobs. To date, Weeks and Kelly said, England appears to be the only country with a national, regulatory eDNA standard; in this case it provisions how eDNA can be used to monitor a specific species. Elsewhere, the legal landscape for eDNA methods remains a bit of a “wild west,” said Schumer.  There is international interest, though. In Canada, eDNAtec has collaborated with the government on a few projects; the country’s Science Advisory Secretariat has also created a guidance document on using eDNA in decision-making. Finland has a national eDNA strategy and Australia developed a national eDNA reference center. Japan maintains a biodiversity monitoring network that uses eDNA and the Danish Environmental Protection Agency uses the tool to monitor for aquatic invasive species. Beginning in 2016, the U.S. government eDNA working group has convened researchers and officials at least six times to discuss the state of eDNA research and how to integrate the tool into governmental work in areas such as invasive species or pollinator monitoring. Some U.S. agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have used eDNA testing. But no national strategy exists in the U.S., though some academics, including Kelly, have advocated for one.  Wide-ranging governmental acceptance of eDNA would mean a windfall for companies selling these tools. Without it, some companies and researchers are hesitant to estimate the market’s future size.  Meanwhile, companies like Best Bees are experimenting with applications outside of traditional environmental monitoring. Wilson-Rich has consulted on how certain honey producers can verify the origin of their product through the plant DNA it contains and sell it at a premium, similar to Manuka honey, a mainstay at health food stores. Sustainable fishery advocates have proposed monitoring for illegal fishing using eDNA. Biologists and engineers have deployed autonomous submersibles to trawl the ocean floor for eDNA that may lead to new drugs. And on farms, scientists have experimented with using eDNA to test soil health and identify pests.  eDNA data could eventually generate value on its own. Last year, BeZero Carbon, an agency that rates the quality of carbon credits, began testing the use of eDNA as a proxy to gauge ecosystem health by looking for changes in the makeup of microbial communities in response to environmental stressors. Its use “as a tool for capturing ecosystem characteristics,” the agency notes on its website, “could be an important step in the development of nature-based credits.” Biodiversity credits could one day be available to companies that demonstrate an improvement to the natural landscape. That credit market is nascent—and it’s already received criticism—but international interest is growing. By 2030, the biodiversity offsets and credit market could be worth over $160 billion, according to BloombergNEF. Measuring biodiversity is more difficult than other voluntary credit systems, like carbon credits, said BeZero Carbon’s chief science officer Nick Atkinson, because biodiversity is not defined by a single measure. eDNA results can be collected over time, demonstrating how an environment changes. “We need the tools and the techniques to be able to measure biodiversity, and eDNA is one of them,” said Atkinson. “It’s very useful.” Along with excitement, though, there is skepticism. Atkinson is quick to point out that eDNA is no “magic bullet.” As with any set of data, it is open to bias, said Kelly at the University of Washington: “It could be analyzed in a responsible way, or an irresponsible way.” Bioethicists also worry that, without regulation, eDNA could lead to serious privacy concerns if companies are not restricted on how they can use it or whether they’re able to sell the data they collect. The tool has other limitations. Environmental DNA currently can’t be used to determine abundance of a species, for instance. And in certain circumstances, eDNA tests can lead to false positives and negatives—a winged creature may pick up plant or animal DNA in a field and drop it in an unexpected place, like a parking lot, or a fish may swim through an area and leave very little DNA behind. “Usually when you don’t detect something, you can’t say it was absent, you can say it wasn’t detected,” said Fahner. “All tests have a limit.” Instead, eDNA may work best if used as “an early warning system” to guide further research, said Weeks. eDNA can provide a snapshot of a landscape and offer information on a wide area; then, those tests may still need to be followed up with catch surveys or field surveys.  “It’s like a hammer, you can pound a nail with it or you can smash your thumb. So, if it’s used correctly, in the right context, it does provide meaningful data that add value to what’s already being done,” said Schumer at Genidaqs. “That added value, that’s the business.” The challenge now, according to Weeks, is to prove that value without overpromising.  “It’s like any new technology: It’ll go through that innovation adoption curve, where you’ll have early adopters, you’ll have this weight of expectation of what it can provide,” he said. “Eventually, there will be some, probably, level of disillusionment, because it can’t actually supply some of the things that people thought it could.”  “The challenge for us, as people that provide the service in the industry,” he added, “is to make sure that weight of expectation never gets beyond what it really can do.”  This story was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In 2010, Noah Wilson-Rich was juggling several jobs while earning his PhD in biology at Tufts University: He taught classes at several nearby universities, and one day a week, tended bar at a cafe in the lobby of the Hult International Business School.

On one of his shifts, he overheard customers discussing a competition for entrepreneurs. The next day, he entered, pitching a company that would gather insect health data at beehives. “They were like, ‘The bartender won?’ said Wilson-Rich. “Okay, you all need to respect your service workers.”

Two thousand dollars in prize money helped Wilson-Rich launch The Best Bees Company. Now, more than a decade later, Best Bees offers corporate and residential beekeeping services near two dozen U.S. cities. The company also charges up to $450 for a “HoneyDNA” kit, which uses environmental DNA, or eDNA—genetic information deposited by a wide range of organisms in the surrounding environment—to test a hive’s health, or simply provide information about the “terroir” of the honey, said Wilson-Rich. The kit, which the company started selling in 2015, includes a sample bottle and a prepaid envelope; upon receipt, Best Bees sends honey samples out to a lab for sequencing to reveal what plant DNA is found in a hive’s product. The results can indicate whether the bees have been feeding on lavender, or how far they’re traveling from the hive; the company also provides corporate sustainability impact reporting.

Best Bees is one of the many companies carving out a niche in a commercial landscape increasingly focused on advertising environmental responsibility, pushed by both customer demand and regulatory requirements. Testing environmental DNA, which allows data to be gathered from the tiny pieces of skin, scales, and slime that species shed as they move through the world, has been framed as a cheap and efficient way to understand a corporation’s impact.

As supporters lobby for regulatory acceptance, a group of large consulting companies and eDNA specialists see the tool as a promising way to monitor corporate sustainability, like measuring the success of conservation efforts or the possible effects of a new bridge or parking lot. Experts say eDNA has limitations and drawbacks. So far, it appears that the tool is best used as one tool among a suite of monitoring methods, so it’s unlikely the technology will completely disrupt the environmental consulting industry, which according to The Insight Partners, a market research firm, was valued at more than $34 billion globally in 2020. But eDNA has undoubtedly created new opportunities to gather and monetize data.

Meanwhile, both company representatives and researchers say it’s still early days in understanding all its possible capabilities and applications; some, like Wilson-Rich, are devising completely novel ways to sell eDNA services. 

“It’s not just science for science’s sake,” said Ryan Kelly, an ecologist and legal scholar at the University of Washington, who works with government agencies on ecosystem management. “We’re making tools that it seems pretty clear can answer questions that haven’t been asked before, or can help people do their jobs better, cheaper, and faster.” 


Often, before any huge infrastructure project can be constructed, governments and regulators require companies to prove they aren’t disturbing the natural landscape where the project would be built. The companies running those assessments, some of them large international corporations, have become an industry unto themselves: By 2028, the environmental consulting market is forecast to reach $50 billion in value, according to The Insight Partners.

eDNA has the potential to make the work of those companies much easier, and much cheaper.  

Traditional environmental monitoring “can be quite a laborious process,” according to Nicole Fahner, executive director at CEGA, an eDNA research and development center, and eDNAtec, a Canadian eDNA company. Such monitoring can require teams of highly trained biologists and ecologists, at times dispersed across sweeping landscapes like deserts and dense forests to set up traps, cameras, and remote sensing equipment. In lakes, streams, or reservoirs, scientists sometimes stick an electrified rod into the water to stun fish, to identify and count them. Surveys may happen multiple times over a series of months. And based on when a species is likely to appear, surveys may be conducted under the cover of night. 

Surveys are even more challenging in parts of the deep ocean where some offshore wind and oil prospectors are eyeing projects, Fahner said, because the depths are difficult to reach and some are home to species that have never been identified and cataloged. 

To meet regulatory requirements, environmental monitoring consulting is “worth a lot of money as an industry,” said Kelly. “If they could do it in a way that was more efficient and more powerful, they would.”

Purveyors of environmental DNA prize its efficiency. eDNA sampling requires fewer people collecting air, dirt, or water in cheap bottles or vials. Much of the work happens back at the lab, where companies extract DNA from samples, sequence it, and then enter the results in a database to identify species matches. eDNA tests can locate a specific species, like an endangered animal or an invasive plant, or provide a picture of an entire ecosystem. And researchers are deploying methods that allow for live sequencing in the field.

Today, according to industry experts, the most well-established use of eDNA for species monitoring is tracking of the great crested newt, an amphibian native to Europe and legally protected in the United Kingdom. Traditional surveys to track the newt required four night missions—one in each season—to trap specimens under plastic bottles, with a return in the morning to count them. For the last several years, biodiversity monitoring companies have used environmental DNA instead. Surveyors can scoop up water at any time of day and the DNA isolated can signal if newts are present, saving both time and labor. 

“It all comes down to that value proposition: What is the advantage of using eDNA over other methods?” said Andrew Weeks, technical director at EnviroDNA, an Australian eDNA company that Weeks believes was the first to operate in the country.


In 2008, Gregg Schumer was working at a highly secure Canadian microbiology lab. His days were spent harvesting animal tissue and testing it for viral DNA from pathogens like Ebola. At the time, a childhood friend was the principal scientist at a consulting company that was tracking the Delta smelt, an endangered fish usually less than three inches long, in California waterways. 

“We began talking,” said Schumer, “and realized that my searching for viruses in organ systems was not unlike trying to find a really small fish in a very big system, and that we could use the exact same technique.” Soon, the two started sampling water from the same California rivers they grew up fishing, analyzing the samples for smelt DNA. In 2009, that work gave rise to one of the earliest environmental DNA companies: Genidaqs. 

Genidaqs got its first grant soon after eDNA entered academic parlance. In 2008, researchers in France proposed a “novel approach” to detect species from aquatic samples, amplifying short sequences of DNA and matching it to a species of frog. That paper is recognized as the first to recommend eDNA to monitor species, but the general concept has been around for much longer, Schumer said.

“The term eDNA, for use in ecological or pathogen-detection applications, in that context, is relatively new,” he said. “But people have been pulling DNA out of the environment ever since they knew that DNA existed.” 

The commercial eDNA landscape rose up soon after the French paper was published, with companies like Genidaqs, pronounced genetics, and SPYGEN, a French company that in 2011 rolled out of the lab that produced that original paper. 

Many eDNA companies have sprouted from academic labs or research settings, after biologists and geneticists familiar with DNA sequencing saw an opening to use the tool to pull more information from uncontrolled settings like rivers. Most companies are relatively young; only in the past few years, Schumer said, has there been enough interest for a company to exist on eDNA-related business alone. 

Large international consulting companies, including Jacobs and Stantec, now also offer environmental DNA services to clients, but sequencing is still largely carried out at a handful of corporate and academic labs. “There’s not very many commercial labs that do environmental DNA work out there, and there’s even fewer that are dedicated towards it,” said Fahner at eDNAtec, founded by a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph in 2015.  

Though eDNA services are becoming more in demand, regulations are most advanced in Europe, where England’s acceptance of eDNA tools to monitor great crested newts in 2014 “really changed things,” said Liz Allchin, global principal for biology and ecology at Jacobs. To date, Weeks and Kelly said, England appears to be the only country with a national, regulatory eDNA standard; in this case it provisions how eDNA can be used to monitor a specific species.

Elsewhere, the legal landscape for eDNA methods remains a bit of a “wild west,” said Schumer. 

There is international interest, though. In Canada, eDNAtec has collaborated with the government on a few projects; the country’s Science Advisory Secretariat has also created a guidance document on using eDNA in decision-making. Finland has a national eDNA strategy and Australia developed a national eDNA reference center. Japan maintains a biodiversity monitoring network that uses eDNA and the Danish Environmental Protection Agency uses the tool to monitor for aquatic invasive species.

Beginning in 2016, the U.S. government eDNA working group has convened researchers and officials at least six times to discuss the state of eDNA research and how to integrate the tool into governmental work in areas such as invasive species or pollinator monitoring. Some U.S. agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have used eDNA testing. But no national strategy exists in the U.S., though some academics, including Kelly, have advocated for one. 

Wide-ranging governmental acceptance of eDNA would mean a windfall for companies selling these tools. Without it, some companies and researchers are hesitant to estimate the market’s future size. 

Meanwhile, companies like Best Bees are experimenting with applications outside of traditional environmental monitoring. Wilson-Rich has consulted on how certain honey producers can verify the origin of their product through the plant DNA it contains and sell it at a premium, similar to Manuka honey, a mainstay at health food stores. Sustainable fishery advocates have proposed monitoring for illegal fishing using eDNA. Biologists and engineers have deployed autonomous submersibles to trawl the ocean floor for eDNA that may lead to new drugs. And on farms, scientists have experimented with using eDNA to test soil health and identify pests. 

eDNA data could eventually generate value on its own. Last year, BeZero Carbon, an agency that rates the quality of carbon credits, began testing the use of eDNA as a proxy to gauge ecosystem health by looking for changes in the makeup of microbial communities in response to environmental stressors. Its use “as a tool for capturing ecosystem characteristics,” the agency notes on its website, “could be an important step in the development of nature-based credits.” Biodiversity credits could one day be available to companies that demonstrate an improvement to the natural landscape. That credit market is nascent—and it’s already received criticism—but international interest is growing. By 2030, the biodiversity offsets and credit market could be worth over $160 billion, according to BloombergNEF.

Measuring biodiversity is more difficult than other voluntary credit systems, like carbon credits, said BeZero Carbon’s chief science officer Nick Atkinson, because biodiversity is not defined by a single measure. eDNA results can be collected over time, demonstrating how an environment changes. “We need the tools and the techniques to be able to measure biodiversity, and eDNA is one of them,” said Atkinson. “It’s very useful.”

Along with excitement, though, there is skepticism. Atkinson is quick to point out that eDNA is no “magic bullet.” As with any set of data, it is open to bias, said Kelly at the University of Washington: “It could be analyzed in a responsible way, or an irresponsible way.” Bioethicists also worry that, without regulation, eDNA could lead to serious privacy concerns if companies are not restricted on how they can use it or whether they’re able to sell the data they collect.

The tool has other limitations. Environmental DNA currently can’t be used to determine abundance of a species, for instance. And in certain circumstances, eDNA tests can lead to false positives and negatives—a winged creature may pick up plant or animal DNA in a field and drop it in an unexpected place, like a parking lot, or a fish may swim through an area and leave very little DNA behind. “Usually when you don’t detect something, you can’t say it was absent, you can say it wasn’t detected,” said Fahner. “All tests have a limit.”

Instead, eDNA may work best if used as “an early warning system” to guide further research, said Weeks. eDNA can provide a snapshot of a landscape and offer information on a wide area; then, those tests may still need to be followed up with catch surveys or field surveys. 

“It’s like a hammer, you can pound a nail with it or you can smash your thumb. So, if it’s used correctly, in the right context, it does provide meaningful data that add value to what’s already being done,” said Schumer at Genidaqs. “That added value, that’s the business.”

The challenge now, according to Weeks, is to prove that value without overpromising. 

“It’s like any new technology: It’ll go through that innovation adoption curve, where you’ll have early adopters, you’ll have this weight of expectation of what it can provide,” he said. “Eventually, there will be some, probably, level of disillusionment, because it can’t actually supply some of the things that people thought it could.” 

“The challenge for us, as people that provide the service in the industry,” he added, “is to make sure that weight of expectation never gets beyond what it really can do.” 


This story was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Hike, Forage, Read: Nature Ideas for Thanksgiving Week

Some ways to commune with nature this Thanksgiving week, whether outside or from a comfy chair. The post Hike, Forage, Read: Nature Ideas for Thanksgiving Week appeared first on Bay Nature.

Wild turkeys ( Meleagris gallopavo) in Ben Lomond, Calif., perform as role models for us all by going for a walk (and doing a passable Abbey Road cover impression while they are at it). runnerman19 via iNaturalist, CC-BY-NC Hardly anybody reads much news this week, according to our website analytics. Therefore, we shall save it for next week. Instead, here are some ways to commune with nature this Thanksgiving week, whether outside or from a comfy chair.   I. Go Outside It beats shopping. First: a roundup of stories in a roundup of stories? Yes. From 2021. Still good, ignore the pandemic references. The dinosaurs roam and flit among us. II. Eat (Very) Local We are not going to tell you to be grateful, but there is food all around us, if you are willing to learn how to find and process it. Two from Sara Calvosa Olson, a Karuk food writer who lives in the Bay Area: Bay nuts taste like hazelnuts with attitude and are not that hard to find. III. And Some Seasonally Appropriate Light Reading Various fowl stories from the archives. Every story from Bay Nature magazine is the product of a team dedicated to connecting our readers to the world around them and increasing environmental literacy. Please help us keep this unique regional magazine thriving, and support the ecosystem we’ve built around it, by subscribing today—you’ll get Bay Nature four times a year in your mailbox! Read This Next June 10, 2024 Baynature.org February 13, 2024 Magazine October 10, 2023 Magazine

Heart-shaped mollusc has windows that work like fibre optics

Tiny, solid windows in the shells of heart cockles let in light for the photosynthetic algae inside them – and they could show us how to make better fibre-optic cables

Heart cockles come in many colours and host photosynthetic algae inside their shellsDakota McCoy A heart-shaped mollusc has evolved tiny windows that work like fibre-optic cables, the first known example in nature. Heart cockles (Corculum cardissa) are bivalve molluscs a bit like clams that have a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae that live inside them. The algae have a safe home, get light to photosynthesise and provide nutrients for their hosts. Unlike other bivalves, heart cockles don’t open their shells up wide, yet they somehow funnel light to their interior even while staying shut. Now, Dakota McCoy at the University of Chicago and her colleagues have found that there are transparent calcium carbonate crystal structures in the heart cockle shells that function like fibre-optic bundles, letting light inside to bathe the algae. “If you don’t have to open and can just have a transparent window, that’s a very safe way to irradiate your algae,” says McCoy. The researchers examined fragments of different heart cockle shells and the transparent structures within them, as well as the intensity and colour of light that gets through. They found that the windows were made from long, thin fibres of a mineral called aragonite – a form of calcium carbonate – which lets twice as much of the photosynthetically useful light through as it does harmful ultraviolet light. “We put on sunblock because UV causes mutations and cancer. The heart cockles are using these windows as a sunblock,” says McCoy. Heart cockle shells illuminated from within to show the transparent windows in their shells, which can be little triangles (left) or stripes (right)Dakota McCoy While the aragonite threads look similar to manufactured fibre optics, they lack a protective, insulating sheath, called cladding, yet transmit light just as effectively. This could serve as an inspiration for cladding-free fibre-optic cables, which would be cheaper to manufacture. The natural, UV-blocking properties of the shells could also be used to help protect corals, which, like the cockles, host photosynthetic algae inside them, but are more susceptible to environmental stresses like light and heat, says McCoy.

As Australia privatises nature repair, the cheapest approach won’t save our threatened species

Australia’s carbon credit scheme largely fails to protect threatened species, despite assumptions to the contrary. The findings provide cautionary lessons for the nature repair scheme.

ShutterstockAustralia is a world-leader in species extinction and environmental decline. So great is the problem, the federal government now wants to harness money from the private sector to pay for nature repair. Under the government’s new “nature repair market”, those who run projects to restore and protect the environment are rewarded with biodiversity credits. These credits can be sold to private buyers, such as corporations wanting to meet environmental goals. The nature repair market is similar in many ways to Ausralia’s existing carbon credit scheme. So, examining the extent to which carbon projects actually protect biodiversity is important as the government sets up the nature repair market. This was the focus of our new research. Alarmingly, we found Australia’s carbon credit scheme largely fails to protect threatened species, despite assumptions to the contrary. The findings provide cautionary lessons for the nature repair scheme. Spotlight on the carbon credit scheme Australia’s carbon credit scheme encourages activities that reduce carbon. They include planting trees, reducing animal grazing on vegetation, or retaining vegetation instead of cutting it down. Project proponents earn credits for carbon reduction, which can then be sold on a carbon market. The scheme also purports to offer “non-carbon” benefits. These include increasing biodiversity and expanding habitats for native species. Indeed, biodiversity conservation has underpinned the carbon credit scheme since it began in 2011. But does the carbon scheme actually benefit biodiversity? To answer this question, we overlaid the locations of carbon-reduction projects with the locations of habitat for threatened plants and animals species. We then scored the level of degradation of each habitat, and identified the processes imperilling the threatened species. So what did we find? Threatened species most in need of habitat restoration are the least likely to have their habitat restored under the carbon credit scheme. Projects under the scheme are primarily located in arid parts of Australia not suitable for growing crops – mostly vast cattle grazing leases. Carbon projects here involve inexpensive activities such as removing some cattle or managing weeds. These areas support habitat for only 6% of Australia’s threatened species. In other words, vegetation loss here generally doesn’t threaten species’ survival. In contrast, just 20% of carbon projects take place on productive agricultural land which supports nearly half of Australia’s threatened species. In these areas, property values are high and landholders can earn good money from farming. That means carbon-reduction projects are often less financially attractive than other land uses, so their number and size is limited. So what’s the upshot? Australia’s carbon projects are concentrated in areas containing little threatened species habitat, rather than where threatened species live and most need protecting. Government policies enable this perverse outcome, by giving preference to projects that can reduce carbon for the lowest cost. This has skewed projects towards unpopulated, relatively unproductive lands. There’s an upside It’s not all bad news, however. We found the carbon credit scheme may protect threatened species in some cases. Almost one-third (or 525) of Australia’s threatened species live in habitat that overlaps with projects under the scheme. In addition, five species whose habitat is not safeguarded in Australia’s protected areas, such as national parks, may also occur on land where carbon projects take place. A further 270 species with too-little protected habitat also overlap with the projects. The potential for positive benefits can be seen by looking at the two regions with the largest concentration of carbon projects in Australia. In the Murchison bioregion in Western Australia, a quarter of species rely on habitat that is not adequately protected elsewhere. In the Mulga bioregion in New South Wales and southwest Queensland, two-thirds of species rely on habitat inadequately protected elsewhere. The Mulga bioregion, one of two in Australia where the carbon credit scheme may protect threatened species. Shutterstock Lessons for nature repair Australia’s nature repair legislation came into effect in late 2023. It creates a framework for the nature repair market which is expected to launch early next year. Our findings provide important lessons for this market. Most importantly, they show a lowest-cost approach to generating credits is unlikely to benefit biodiversity. It will drive projects to marginal areas that do not overlap the ranges of species threatened by habitat loss. If nature repair investment is to prevent species extinctions, the Australian government must ensure taxpayer funds actually achieve these outcomes. The best way to do that is to speed up the progress of promised environmental law reform. Likewise, as global conservation increasingly looks to private finance and biodiversity markets, we must ensure funds are delivered to where they are most needed. Penny van Oosterzee is a Director of the Thiaki Rainforest Research Project, which generates Australian Carbon Credit Units as part of a restoration and research project in the Wet Tropics of Australia. Penny van Oosterzee has been a partner for two Australian Research Council projects. Jayden Engert receives funding from the Australian Commonwealth Government through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Negotiations Stall Over Some Crucial Issues on Final Day of UN Biodiversity Summit in Colombia

At the United Nations biodiversity summit in Colombia, negotiators struggle to find common ground on key issues, such as how to finance protections for 30% of the Earth's wild species by 2023 and how to make payments for nature’s genetic data

CALI, Colombia (AP) — At the United Nations biodiversity summit in Colombia, negotiators have struggled to find common ground on key issues.These include how to finance protections for 30% of the world's plants and animals by 2030, how to establish a permanent body for Indigenous peoples and how to make payments for nature’s genetic data that's used to create commercial products.The two-week conference, known as COP16, was due to wrap up Friday, although observers say negotiations could go into the weekend. In 2022, the biodiversity summit in Montreal, COP15, established a framework for countries to go about saving plummeting global ecosystems. This year’s follow-up summit was to put plans into motion. "COP15 was all about the ‘what’; this was supposed to be about the ‘how,’” Georgina Chandler, head of policy and campaigns at The Zoological Society of London, told The Associated Press. Wealthy nations pledged in Montreal’s summit to raise $20 billion in annual conservation financing for developing nations by 2025 — with that rising to $30 billion annually by 2030. “I don’t think we’ve seen governments come here with increased commitments towards the $20 billion significant enough that we’re going to achieve that," Chandler said. "That’s fallen a bit short.”The lack of financial pledges from wealthy countries prompted 20 ministers from the Global South to release a joint statement calling for the need to build trust among nations and for the Global North to meet its finance targets. In the run-up to negotiations, over 230 businesses and financial institutions demanded stronger policy ambitions to address the growing risks of nature loss, said Eva Zabey, CEO of Business for Nature. “In the final stretch at COP16, negotiations are stalling on crucial issues — including the mobilization of meaningful financial resources and a way for companies to ensure the benefits of nature are valued and shared fairly,” Zabey said. “We need governments to put aside their differences and demonstrate real and urgent leadership to deliver a strong COP16 outcome that incentivizes and drives necessary business action, further and faster, to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030,” she said. Who owns nature's DNA was a major topic at the summit. There was tension between poorer and developed countries over digital sequence information on genetic resources (DSI). This would oblige the sharing of benefits when genetic resources from animals, plants or microorganisms are used in biotechnologies. In Montreal, countries agreed to set up a global fund. “The DSI fund was scheduled to be adopted here two years ago. There is no clarity on how money will be gathered from companies,” said Oscar Soria, director of The Common Initiative. “As the text reads it is purely voluntary.” Sources told AP that there has been significant back and forth over wording in the draft agreement by nations. ’It’s clear that a number of points are going down to the wire in the COP16 negotiations," Catherine Weller, Director of Global Policy at charity Fauna & Flora said. One of the biggest controversies during talks was the blocking by a few countries of a Permanent Subsidiary Body for Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who Weller says bring valuable insights to many discussions. “We urge the negotiators to step up and ensure this is finalized,” she said.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Green farming budget freeze 'will hit nature work'

Environmental groups warn that next year's farm payments budget will not be enough to protect nature.

Green farming budget freeze 'will hit nature work'Getty ImagesEnvironmental groups say more money needs to be invested in the annual farm payments budgetEnvironmental groups have warned that work to boost biodiversity across the UK countryside will be put at risk by the government’s decision to freeze the level of payments to farms in England.Farmers - already angry at changes to inheritance tax rules announced in the Budget - have been told payments from the public purse will be frozen next year.The Wildlife Trusts say the decision leaves a "monumental gap" between current environmental land management scheme (Elms) funding and what is needed to help farmers protect and boost wildlife and its habitats, while still producing food.The government said it would maintain the £2.4bn current level of farm payments in England for 2025/26, and that its commitment to farming was "steadfast".James GrindalJames Grindal says the government has failed to protect smaller family farmsOne farmer told the BBC he no longer believed the government understood the pressures of producing the nation’s food and protecting the countryside.James Grindal, a mixed arable and livestock farmer in Leicestershire, said: “I wouldn’t think the government has any idea."I think they ought to come and see the reality - the coalface of putting food on people’s plates."In Wednesday's Budget, the Chancellor announced that, while there would continue to be no inheritance tax due on combined business and agricultural assets worth less than £1m, above that there would be a 50% relief, at an effective rate of 20%, from April 2026.While some maintain the new policy is designed in part to cover large-scale landowners who may have invested in farmland for the tax benefit, many in farming say the £1m limit will hit small family farms hardest.Mr Grindal, who has two sons, aged 17 and 19, said he could be hit twice by the changes – on handing down the family farm, and if landowners sell off the land he rents.CLAVictoria Vyvyan from the CLA said the decision to freeze the farming budget would hit sustainable food production"I explained to my youngest son, who asked what the implications were, that if you take 20% off something every time someone dies, it’s not long before you get to nought," he said.“The Chancellor said she wants to protect small farms, but she is protecting the person who made a lot of money somewhere, bought a nice house with 20, 30, 50 acres to have a few horses on."Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Tim Farron said of the changes to agricultural property inheritance tax relief: "This is a family farm tax which risks ringing the death knell for local farmers and the small businesses who rely on them."Conservationists and environmental groups have spoken out on the government’s plans to maintain the farming payments budget at its current annual level of £2.4bn, the majority of which goes on environmental land management schemes.The Wildlife Trusts said around £3.1bn was needed for environmental farming schemes in England, and that maintaining the budget at current levels was a real-terms cut.'Largest ever budget'Elliot Chapman-Jones, the Trusts’ head of public affairs, said: “Ultimately, there is a monumental gap between current funding and what is needed to reverse wildlife declines, clean up rivers and significantly reduce the use of chemicals on farms."Tom Lancaster, land, food and farming analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, said all the budget did was "maintain the status quo, just about keeping the show on the road for now".The Country Land and Business Association's (CLA) president Victoria Vyvyan said the decision to freeze the budget at the same level would hit hard-pressed farmers.She added: "It could hit sustainable food production and undermine improvements to wildlife habitats, flood management and access to nature."The government said the £2.4bn farming budget for England in 2025/26 would still be the “largest ever budget directed at sustainable food production and nature’s recovery”.Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs Daniel Zeichner said: “Our commitment to farmers and the vital role they play to feed our nation remains steadfast.“That is why this government will commit to the largest ever budget directed at sustainable food production and nature’s recovery in our country’s history, enabling us to keep momentum on the path to a more resilient and sustainable farming sector.”

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