Shallon Jozi M

SHALLON MUTSA JOZI, Virginia Tech

     Abstract Number: 269
     Working Group: Bioaerosols

Abstract
Mapping ecosystem biodiversity using airborne environmental DNA 
Shallon Jozi, Amira Hansch, Nicolas Gustafson, Roger Schuerch, Scotty Yang, Gabriel Isaacman-Vanwertz

Insects provide services worth billions of dollars each year, such as pollination, nutrient cycling, and contributing to soil health. Alarmingly, insects are sharply declining, with up to 75% of insect bio-mass lost in the past three decades. Current methods to study these insect declines are labor intensive because they involve manual work (trapping and insect ID) for spatially resolved measurements. We developed simple, portable devices that can sample with limited operator presence to enable temporally and/or spatially resolved measurements. These new portable and programmable samplers enable simultaneous collection of samples across a spatially distributed network, which we demonstrate here as a method to sample airborne DNA. In this presentation we validate their reproducibility and demonstrate their utility for identifying species-specific DNA and quantifying hotspots. We sample onto commercially available filters and extract eDNA using standard DNA assay kits. Primers for general arthropods and specific species are used to provide binary information on presence and absence. Though concentrations of species-specific DNA are typically too low to allow quantification, we co-locate multiple samples and use fraction of positives to estimate source strength. With this approach we can demonstrate mapping of species-specific DNA as well as enable broader biodiversity surveying. In this work we focus on three specific species – honeybees, mealworm beetles, and brown marmorated stink bug – to validate the approach and demonstrate correlations between source strength (number of individuals, activity, etc.) and detection of species-specific DNA.