Ole Shelton1
1Northwest Fisheries Science Center
February 24, 2015 09:00 (PST)
Inferring marine communities from environmental DNA: merging traditional and new molecular techniques in the sampling of the oceans.
Environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material recovered from an environmental medium such as soil, water, or feces—reflects the membership of the ecological community present in the sampled environment. As such, eDNA is a potentially vast source of data for basic ecology, conservation, and management, because it offers the prospect of quantitatively sampling ecological communities from easily-obtained and non-lethal samples. However, like all sampling methods, eDNA sequencing is subject to methodological limitations that bias the resulting estimates of abundance and community membership. I will describe a framework for thinking about current methodological challenges for eDNA, discuss how these challenges are largely analogous to biases in more traditional survey methods, and provide detailed discussion of methods for an important step in the eDNA process – estimating relative abundance of DNA from marine community.