Conservation in a Cup of Water: Reciprocal Feedbacks Between Edna Technology and Fisheries Management

Environmental DNA (eDNA) offers a technological solution to one of the persistent impediments to improved management and policy regarding imperiled or invasive species: unlike traditional capture methods, eDNA methods are increasingly portable and affordable for frequent sampling within geographically broad surveillance programs. Recent results from lotic and lentic habitats demonstrate that compared to traditional sampling methods to detect species, eDNA detection limits (from PCR) are lower, and species richness estimates (from high throughput sequencing) are higher and more accurate. Furthermore, concentration of eDNA (from qPCR) is often correlated with population size of the target species. The potential is great for future methodological improvements and novel applications because of increasingly available genomic data (including mitogenomes), increasingly automated water quality sampling, new eDNA detection methods, remote sampling and wireless reporting of environmental data, and the development of new theory for estimating species richness and abundance from ultrasequencing. Given these technological and theoretical advances, new management and policy approaches for invasive species can more greatly emphasize prevention and rapid response for a variety of vectors. For imperiled species, remnant populations can be more easily located, and critical habitats more easily identified and managed.