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Assessing the biodiversity of an area is one of those dirty jobs that somebody's gotta do. But researchers in Denmark and Australia have devised a way to shortcut the classical technique of calculating biodiversity, which involves time and labor intensive methods of trapping and tagging various animals in a given ecosystem. A faithful representation of which species and how many individuals of each inhabit a particular area can instead by gleaned from DNA samples lurking in the soil, they report in a paper published this month in Molecular Ecology.
"This is the first time anyone has shown that 'dirt' DNA not only reflects what species live in an area, but how many [individuals] there are," evolutionary biologist and study coauthor Eske Willerslev told Nature. Willerslev ...