A new technology resembling a waterborne drone aims to independently collect environmental DNA (eDNA) from the world’s oceans, providing scientists and other stakeholders with the data they need to track and manage local biodiversity at scale.
The new technology will be born out of a partnership announced Tuesday between nature intelligence and eDNA company NatureMetrics and Dartmouth Ocean Technologies (DOT), a manufacturer of oceanographic instruments.
“By combining our expertise, we can provide managers and conservationists with a comprehensive solution that will enable them to make informed decisions about how best to conserve the ocean’s ecosystems,” Arnold Furlong of Dartmouth Ocean Technologies said in a press release.
Resembling a small submarine, the technology will be outfitted with eDNA filters and offer automatic operation with long-term unsupervised deployment under the sea at a scale that has not been possible before.
The aim is to recover data that can be used for eDNA sampling, a method that can be used to understand the biodiversity present in a particular location, including endangered or otherwise important wildlife.
The technique has garnered recent attention in the biodiversity credit world, where biodiversity data will be required for measuring and verifying a project’s impacts.
Tracking biodiversity through eDNA offers several advantages over traditional environmental surveys, including improving accuracy while also reducing cost.
The companies said that there will also be safety benefits compared to traditional sampling methods, such as observations from small boats.
NatureMetrics has been providing eDNA services for over five years, and has facilitated data collection in over 92 countries – with samples analysed in laboratories in the UK and Canada.
While eDNA metrics can be used for a variety of activities related to managing resources and conserving ecosystems, it could prove to be instrumental to the nascent biodiversity market where quantifying uplifts in biodiversity are needed to generate credits.
The technique is already being tested by project developer rePlanet, which is using the NatureMetrics service to help measure improvements in its grassland restoration project in Transylvania.
Meanwhile, DOT’s marine instruments have been deployed since 2019 in a variety of situations, including challenging environments such as the deep ocean, and can provide real time data on metrics like temperature and water quality.
The two organisations hope that combining their expertise will allow for commercial scale eDNA collection to help a variety of marine industries – from offshore energy industries to oceanographic and fisheries organisations.
“This partnership represents a significant step forward in the practicality and benefit of eDNA technology to marine industries as we can now provide a broader range of sampling devices to unlock nature insights from a much wider range of marine ecosystems,” Samuel Stanton, head of marine at NatureMetrics, said in a statement.
“We can offer new opportunities to collect data in locations that was previously not feasible, whilst reducing the need for extensive man hours, improving ROI for marine clients whilst generating robust datasets on biodiversity,” he added.
By Katherine Monahan – katherine@carbon-pulse.com
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