National Marine Biomonitoring with DNA

Summary:

1. Food insecurity, declining biodiversity, and a changing ocean are all challenges we are facing and will continue to face in the future.
2. The only way to know how marine organisms and their diversity are responding to these changes is through monitoring.
3. The federal and state governments have made great strides in monitoring select marine species, however those species live in ecosystems with interdependencies on other species within the marine environment, which are not comprehensively monitored.
4. With 9.3 billion pounds of seafood landed by U.S. commercial fishers in 2019 valued at $5.5 billion, it is critical that we gain a more comprehensive understanding of our marine biodiversity and ecosystems for the livelihoods and sustainability of U.S. citizens.
5. We can now use environmental DNA (eDNA) - DNA from any organism (from microbes to larger vertebrates) shed into the environment - at a lower cost, and thus greater frequency of observation, than existing methods to gain more detailed monitoring of our complex marine ecosystems and its biodiversity.
6. eDNA in the water column can be captured from any coastal location and offshore sampling is possible by leveraging existing offshore activities (e.g., research, military, transport, fishing).
7. In addition to the existing national agencies' traditional monitoring methods, we can broaden the biodiversity monitored with community-based models like those used in California, the EU, Palau, and New Zealand, where citizens who are vested in their local marine environments can collect seawater to capture eDNA.
8. Local eDNA collections can enable citizens and community leaders to make more informed decisions about their local marine environments in not only our coastal urban centers, but also rural and remote coastal regions.
9. Biomonitoring with eDNA offers an efficient way to detect species of concern protected under state and federal legislation (e.g., ESA) as well as invasive species and on other legal grounds where compliance is necessary (e.g., NEPA).
10. With federal leadership and support, a framework can be constructed to transform marine biodiversity monitoring with the addition of both eDNA and citizen participation to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how marine organisms are impacted by the forecasted global change in our future.

Sector: Academia
Organization: Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University
POC: Collin Closek, closek@stanford.edu