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Airborne environmental DNA for terrestrial vertebrate community monitoring

Christina Lynggaard, Mads Frost Bertelsen, Casper V. Jensen, Matthew S. Johnson, Tobias Guldberg Frøslev, Morten Tange Olsen, Kristine Bohmann
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.16.452634
Christina Lynggaard
1Section for Evolutionary Genomics, The Globe Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, DK-1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark
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  • For correspondence: christina.lynggaard@sund.ku.dk kbohmann@sund.ku.dk
Mads Frost Bertelsen
2Center for Wild Animal Health, Copenhagen Zoo, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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Casper V. Jensen
3Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 5, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
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Matthew S. Johnson
3Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 5, DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
4Airlabs Denmark, Nannasgade 28, DK-2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark
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Tobias Guldberg Frøslev
5Section for GeoGenetics, Globe Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, DK-1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark
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Morten Tange Olsen
1Section for Evolutionary Genomics, The Globe Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, DK-1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark
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Kristine Bohmann
1Section for Evolutionary Genomics, The Globe Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, DK-1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark
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  • For correspondence: christina.lynggaard@sund.ku.dk kbohmann@sund.ku.dk
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Summary

Assessing and studying the distribution, ecology, diversity and movements of species is key in understanding environmental and anthropogenic effects on natural ecosystems. Although environmental DNA is rapidly becoming the tool of choice to assess biodiversity 1–3 there are few eDNA sample types that effectively capture terrestrial vertebrate diversity and those that do can be laborious to collect, require special permits and contain PCR inhibitory substances, which can lead to detection failure. Thus there is an urgent need for novel environmental DNA approaches for efficient and cost-effective large-scale routine monitoring of terrestrial vertebrate diversity. Here we show that DNA metabarcoding of airborne environmental DNA filtered from air can be used to detect a wide range of local vertebrate taxa. We filtered air at three localities in Copenhagen Zoo, detecting mammal, bird, amphibian and reptile species present in the zoo or its immediate surroundings. Our study demonstrates that airDNA has the capacity to complement and extend existing terrestrial vertebrate monitoring methods and could form the cornerstone of programs to assess and monitor terrestrial communities, for example in future global next generation biomonitoring frameworks 4,5.

Competing Interest Statement

Matthew Johnson is the Chief Science Officer at Airlabs, the company that designed and built the 3D housings for the particle samplers used in this study. The blueprints of these housings are however freely available and provided in Supplementary Methods. All other air sampling equipment, i.e. the water vacuum, blower-fans used for the 24 V and 5 V particle samplers, and the batteries are available in commercial companies not related to Airlabs. Thereby, the current study is not of direct commercial value to Airlabs. None of the remaining authors had any conflicts of interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted July 16, 2021.
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Airborne environmental DNA for terrestrial vertebrate community monitoring
Christina Lynggaard, Mads Frost Bertelsen, Casper V. Jensen, Matthew S. Johnson, Tobias Guldberg Frøslev, Morten Tange Olsen, Kristine Bohmann
bioRxiv 2021.07.16.452634; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.16.452634
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Airborne environmental DNA for terrestrial vertebrate community monitoring
Christina Lynggaard, Mads Frost Bertelsen, Casper V. Jensen, Matthew S. Johnson, Tobias Guldberg Frøslev, Morten Tange Olsen, Kristine Bohmann
bioRxiv 2021.07.16.452634; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.16.452634

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