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Wildlife surveys using 'DNA vacuums'! 🌳 💨 🦊 🦅 🐸

With just 3 days of ‘vacuuming’ airborne eDNA in a Danish forest, we detected 64 animals - domestic, exotic pets and.. over 50 species of wild birds, mammals and amphibians! This was our first exploration of airborne eDNA in a natural setting and we were especially surprised by the high number of bird taxa detected.

You can find the paper here: doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.1384

Thank you to all coauthors and to VILLUM FONDEN for the support.

@biodiversity is there any potential of contamination of data by, for example migratory birds carrying things contaminated with dna from places nowhere near the area you are monitoring?

Dr. Christina Lynggaard

@TT_392 Sure, we saw this in our previous work at the Zoo in Copenhagen where we think people were carrying DNA from zoo animals. However, this foreign DNA carried by migratory birds would be degraded and the probability of detecting it would be lower than detecting "in site/fresh" DNA. We still need to optimise this method, so there are still many questions left to explore.