Abstract
Biodiversity loss threatens ecosystems and human well-being, making accurate, large-scale monitoring crucial. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has enabled species detection from substrates such as water, without the need for direct observation. Lately, airborne eDNA has been showing promise for tracking organisms from insects to mammals in terrestrial ecosystems. Conventional biodiversity assessments are often labor-intensive and limited in scope, leaving gaps in our understanding of ecosystem response to environmental change. Here, we demonstrate that airborne eDNA can detect organisms across the tree of life, quantify changes in abundance congruent with traditional monitoring, and reveal land-use induced regional decline of diversity in a northern boreal ecosystem over more than three decades. By analyzing 34 years of archived aerosol filters, we reconstruct weekly temporal relative abundance data for more than 2700 genera using non-targeted methods. This study provides unified, ecosystem-scale biodiversity surveillance spanning multiple decades, with data collected at weekly intervals on both the individual species and community level. Previously, large scale analyses of ecosystem changes, targeting all types of organisms, has been prohibitively expensive and difficult to attempt. Here, we present a way of holistically doing this type of analysis in a single framework.
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First national survey of terrestrial biodiversity using airborne eDNA
Shotgun sequencing of airborne eDNA achieves rapid assessment of whole biomes, population genetics and genomic variation
Archived natural DNA samplers reveal four decades of biodiversity change across the tree of life
Data availability
The sequencing data generated in this study are deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession code PRJNA808200. The processed relative abundance data are available in Supplementary Data 6. External datasets used are land cover data (Swedish National Land Cover Database, www.naturvardsverket.se/en/services-and-permits/maps-and-map-services/national-land-cover-database/), map vector data (Natural Earth, www.naturalearthdata.com/), weather data (Copernicus Climate Change Service, https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac, National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Reanalysis project, psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/reanalysis/, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), www.smhi.se/data/hitta-data-for-en-plats/ladda-ner-vaderobservationer, Climatology Lab, www.climatologylab.org/terraclimate.html, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – Climate Prediction Center, www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov, Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI), etccdi.pacificclimate.org/data.shtml), reference sequence data (National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/, accession numbers for all sequences used in the Kraken database are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17778887), species observational data (Swedish Species Observation System database, artportalen.se, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), www.gbif.org, Swedish Bird Survey, www.fageltaxering.lu.se, Sámi Parliament of Sweden (Sámediggi), sametinget.se/renstatistik), and forestry data (The Swedish National Forest Inventory (NFI), www.slu.se/en/about-slu/organisation/departments/forest-resource-management/miljoanalys/nfi/, Swedish Forest Agency, www.skogsstyrelsen.se/laddanergeodata).
Code availability
StringMeUp, a computer program developed in-house and used in the classification of the sequence data, and the Kraken 2 fork are both available under DOIs https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17569636 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17570001, respectively.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Catharina Söderström and Johan Kastlander (CBRN Defense and Security, Swedish Defense Research Agency) for providing access to the air filter archive, and Benedicte Albrectsen and Göran Englund for their feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. We also wish to thank five anonymous reviewers for constructive criticism. We acknowledge support from the Science for Life Laboratory and the National Genomics Infrastructure (NGI) for providing assistance in massive parallel sequencing. The computations were enabled by resources provided by the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at UPPMAX and HPC2N, partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement nos. 2022-06725 and 2018-05973. Thomas Ågren provided the organism illustrations in Figs. 1–3. Modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2020 was used for the catchment area analysis. Neither the European Commission nor the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. This study was supported by Formas (grant agreement nos. 2016-01371: PS, MF; 2019-00579: P.S., T.B., and M.F.; 2021-02155: PS, MF; 2024-01990: P.S., T.B., M.F., and N.S.), together with grants from Vetenskapsrådet (2021-06283: P.S. and M.F.), SciLifeLab Biodiversity fund (NP00048: P.S., M.F., and T.B.), Kempe foundation (JCK-1919: P.S., M.F., and T.B.), Umeå University Industrial research school (P.S.) and Swedish Defense Research Agency (M.F.)
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P.S., M.F., T.B., and E.K. conceived and designed the study; E.K. and A.M.J. extracted DNA; DSv constructed the database and performed read classification; E.K., A.R.S., D.B., D.S.v. pre-processed the data; A.R.S. designed and implemented the machine learning approach; and H.G. constructed the particle models. A.R.S. and E.K. conducted most of the data analysis, with support from D.S.v., D.B., A.B.S., J.A.V., A.M., D.S.u., B.B., A.N., A.S., N.S., and P.A.E. E.K., A.R.S., D.S.v., B.B., P.S., and N.S. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed intellectual input and approved the final version
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Sullivan, A.R., Karlsson, E., Svensson, D. et al. Airborne eDNA captures three decades of ecosystem biodiversity.
Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67676-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67676-7
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