Airborne eDNA as a Frontier for Scalable, Automated, Multi-Taxon Biodiversity Monitoring

Biodiversity is declining globally, yet our ability to monitor these changes remains limited by methods that are labor-intensive, taxonomically narrow, and slow to detect emerging shifts. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has become a powerful tool in aquatic ecosystems, but its use on land remains constrained by the difficulty of collecting representative and integrated samples.

Airborne eDNA offers a promising solution. Air carries biological material from organisms across the tree of life and can be sampled anywhere using simple, robust devices. Because airborne eDNA can be collected autonomously and at high frequency, it enables biodiversity assessment at scales and resolutions that traditional approaches cannot achieve. This opens the possibility of measuring the Earth’s biological layer much as we measure the physical atmosphere today—using networks of ground-based “satellites” that continuously sense airborne biological signals and support models with the mechanistic understanding and predictive power of today’s weather and climate models.

At DNAir, we are developing the methods and technology to realise this vision. Our goal is to unlock airborne biological information as a new stream of global biological intelligence, with applications in biodiversity monitoring, agriculture, and human health. By combining autonomous air sampling with standardized laboratory and bioinformatic workflows, we aim to generate frequent and comparable biodiversity signals across sites, seasons, and ecosystems.

In this presentation, I will share early results from pilot studies demonstrating the potential of airborne eDNA in diverse environments -from multi-taxon monitoring campaigns in Switzerland and France, where airborne eDNA captures plants, fungi, insects, and vertebrates simultaneously to vertebrate surveys in eastern Africa and tests of airborne eDNA sampling for coastal marine monitoring in the North Sea. I will also outline our assessment for where airborne eDNA stands today and discuss key scientific and practical challenges on the path ahead.