PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Christina Lynggaard
AU  - Mads Frost Bertelsen
AU  - Casper V. Jensen
AU  - Matthew S. Johnson
AU  - Tobias Guldberg Frøslev
AU  - Morten Tange Olsen
AU  - Kristine Bohmann
TI  - Airborne environmental DNA for terrestrial vertebrate community monitoring
AID  - 10.1101/2021.07.16.452634
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.07.16.452634
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/16/2021.07.16.452634.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/07/16/2021.07.16.452634.full
AB  - 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 StatementMatthew 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.