About This Project

A new molecular tool that identifies marine species from genetic material in water—“environmental DNA”, or eDNA—could revolutionize ocean monitoring and transform our ability to manage marine ecosystems sustainably. We want to test this tool in Northern California’s oceans. The results will reveal how geographical distributions of California marine species shift during the year and in response to the environment, and will help us forecast the effects of future changes.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The planet is changing rapidly. To preserve biodiversity and manage natural resources sustainably for all of us, we need ongoing data about the natural world. In ecosystems like the intertidal—the beaches, rocks, and cliffs that separate land from sea—these data have only been collected sparsely over the years through time-intensive surveys. This leaves us in the dark about how this unique, beautiful, and important ecosystem is responding to global change. Environmental DNA or "eDNA" is revolutionizing our ability to monitor marine ecosystems, but has still rarely been deployed for real-time monitoring.

What is the significance of this project?

The project will begin a data collection program on Northern California intertidal ecosystems by sampling eDNA from a range of sites and identifying the species that are present. If this proof of concept is successful, we hope to start a long-term eDNA monitoring program along the West Coast to give us real-time, high-resolution data on what species are present. This will help policymakers and conservationists respond to global change. For example, this type of eDNA monitoring program can provide early warning signals of some species shifting north in response to climate change or others going extinct.

What are the goals of the project?

We'll identify intertidal sites that are already part of biological research programs so we know they are accessible and we have a sense of the baseline ecosystem state. We'll make a schedule of when to visit which sites; hopefully we can do some in multiple seasons to get a sense of how the species present changes through the year. The sampling is straightforward and just involves filling specialized vials with water. Those samples get shipped off to a lab for sequencing, and the lab returns to us a list of which species were present in which samples.

With this list we can ask a bunch of exciting questions about the intertidal. Which species do we find in Northern California? Is that the same or different from other methods? Are they shifting in response to global change?