Biodiversity, Quick and Dirty

Researchers find that sampling DNA from the soil can be an effective way to determine how many individuals of a variety of species inhabit a particular area.

Written byBob Grant

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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