Airborne eDNA captures three decades of ecosystem biodiversity

Biodiversity loss threatens ecosystems and human well-being, making accurate, large-scale monitoring crucial. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has enabled species detection from substrates such as water, without the need for direct observation. Lately, airborne eDNA has been showing promise for tracking organisms from insects to mammals in terrestrial ecosystems. Conventional biodiversity assessments are often labor-intensive and limited in scope, leaving gaps in our understanding of ecosystem response to environmental change. Here, we demonstrate that airborne eDNA can detect organisms across the tree of life, quantify changes in abundance congruent with traditional monitoring, and reveal land-use induced regional decline of diversity in a northern boreal ecosystem over more than three decades. By analyzing 34 years of archived aerosol filters, we reconstruct weekly temporal relative abundance data for more than 2700 genera using non-targeted methods. This study provides unified, ecosystem-scale biodiversity surveillance spanning multiple decades, with data collected at weekly intervals on both the individual species and community level. Previously, large scale analyses of ecosystem changes, targeting all types of organisms, has been prohibitively expensive and difficult to attempt. Here, we present a way of holistically doing this type of analysis in a single framework.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nature Communications
Published
2025-12-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67676-7
Citations
2
Primary Topic
Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
3.43

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article

Airborne eDNA captures three decades of ecosystem biodiversity

Anna‐Mia Johansson, Abu Bakar Siddique, Daniel Bellieny‐Rabelo, Björn Brindefalk et al.
2 citations
Nature Communications
Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies
3.43
article

Airborne eDNA captures three decades of ecosystem biodiversity

Anna‐Mia Johansson, Abu Bakar Siddique, Daniel Bellieny‐Rabelo, Björn Brindefalk, Per Stenberg, Per‐Anders Esseen, David Sundell, Andreas Sjödin, Mats Forsman, Alexis R. Sullivan, Daniel Svensson, Anita J. Norman, Edvin Karlsson, Tomas Brodin, Navinder J. Singh, Amanda Mikko, Håkan Grahn, Jose Antonio Lozano Villegas
article en
2 citations

Abstract

Biodiversity loss threatens ecosystems and human well-being, making accurate, large-scale monitoring crucial. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has enabled species detection from substrates such as water, without the need for direct observation. Lately, airborne eDNA has been showing promise for tracking organisms from insects to mammals in terrestrial ecosystems. Conventional biodiversity assessments are often labor-intensive and limited in scope, leaving gaps in our understanding of ecosystem response to environmental change. Here, we demonstrate that airborne eDNA can detect organisms across the tree of life, quantify changes in abundance congruent with traditional monitoring, and reveal land-use induced regional decline of diversity in a northern boreal ecosystem over more than three decades. By analyzing 34 years of archived aerosol filters, we reconstruct weekly temporal relative abundance data for more than 2700 genera using non-targeted methods. This study provides unified, ecosystem-scale biodiversity surveillance spanning multiple decades, with data collected at weekly intervals on both the individual species and community level. Previously, large scale analyses of ecosystem changes, targeting all types of organisms, has been prohibitively expensive and difficult to attempt. Here, we present a way of holistically doing this type of analysis in a single framework.

Nature CommunicationsVol. 16(1)
Swedish Defence Research Agency (SE), Stockholm University (SE), Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SE), Umeå Plant Science Centre (SE), Umeå University (SE)
Kempe Foundation, European Commission, Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas, Vetenskapsrådet, Umeå Universitet, Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science
Openalex Percentile: Top 7%
Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies
3.43
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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