Biodiversity lies at the intersection of everything we care about and study. We measure biodiversity comprehensively and monitor its changes in response to climate and other factors. We are as interested in the tiny things in the ocean—viruses, bacteria, protists, meiofauna—as we are in salmon and whales. Our facilities provide us access to locales ideally suited for studying biodiversity. We have the full suite of capabilities among our staff and partners, ranging from classical field ecology to technology-driven approaches based on genomics and autonomous instruments.
Every organism sheds DNA—environmental DNA, or eDNA for short—leaving behind a trail that we can follow by sampling water and other substrates and analyzing in our laboratories, thereby monitoring biodiversity today across a broad spectrum. Most eDNA is rapidly degraded through biological, chemical, and physical processes, but under favorable conditions, a small portion is stabilized and preserved in sediments for thousands of years. We have developed the expertise and infrastructure to recover and process this “sedimentary ancient DNA”—sedaDNA for short—thereby extending our biodiversity studies to the distant past.
