Observing life in the California Current using environmental DNA: Links to remote sensing

Life in the sea provides immense benefits to humans, from the food we eat, to the air we breathe, to the climate we live in. And because of human activities, the once seemingly vast and inexhaustible seas are changing – they are increasingly threatened by impacts on a global scale, such as warming and acidification, as well as those that are more localized like overfishing and pollution. Many of the species that live in the sea, meanwhile, are still unknown.  Even for the known species, our understanding of their roles in the ecosystem is still limited. Now more than ever, increased observation of life in the sea is required to find and describe unknown species, observe shifts in species abundance and distribution, identify adaptability and resilience to climate change, and understand vital roles that species play in our marine systems. New and emerging technologies promise to enable observation over the required temporal and spatial scales. And emerging data systems will allow development of critical ecological understanding, while informing responsible use of marine natural resources.  Environmental DNA is an emerging technology that eventually may be used to scale observations of biodiversity to similar time and space scales as those for ocean physics. Here we report on using environmental DNA to observe life in the California Current though a broad partnership with observing programs that span the region from the Mexico to the Oregon California borders. This joint partnership is supported by funding provided by the US Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) program. Biological productivity in the California Current is driven by seasonal upwelling that is perturbed on interannual to multidecadal time scales. Observations made to date capture these seasonal to multidecadal variations in marine biodiversity across multiple trophic levels. The observations also pick up harmful algal blooms and the presence /absence of endangered/invasive species.