Wednesday Talk: January 8 , 2025, at 2-4pm. It is in-person and on Zoom

Speaker: Elizabeth Clare, Biology, York University

Title: “A Chance to Measure Life on Earth: The Potential of Airborne eDNA”

Abstract: Rapid monitoring across all life is necessary to quantify biodiversity at regional and continental scales, infer trends and assess the success or failure of landscape-scale conservation measures. Yet, we lack standardized methods and globally distributed infrastructures to tackle such tasks. Biodiversity surveys are still taxon specific or local in scope and extremely labour intensive. And yet, DNA is everywhere. It is shed by all animals, plants and microbes into the environment all the time. We leave it behind, like a footprint everywhere we go. It sticks to every surface, it floats around in rivers and lakes, and now we know it moves through the air around us. This is gives us an astonishing non-invasive way to monitor life on earth. In this presentation we will explore the amazing world of “environmental DNA”, one of the fastest growing areas of biodiversity science. We will look at the development of this field from mammoth DNA trapped in ice to bat DNA wafting around caves and we will look at what happens when we harness the power of thousands of air quality monitoring stations to track life on land at an unprecedented scale.

Bio:  Elizabeth Clare was a faculty member at Queen Mary University of London from 2013-2021 and moved to York University in Toronto in 2021. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy of the UK and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London a Research Associate of the Royal Ontario Museum and an Honorary Fellow of University College London. In 2024 she was elected as a member of the Royal Society of Canada in the college of New Scholars.

The Clare lab investigates biodiversity at all levels from the interactions between microbes to the patterns of biodiversity across countries. It is well known for innovative use of new technologies. Prof. Clare was one of the first people in the world to use DNA to track the diets of predators, pollinators and parasites and most recently she has demonstrated that large scale measurements of biodiversity can be made from filtering environmental DNA from air. She’s now engaged in international projects to track changing terrestrial biodiversity at national scales using networks of air quality monitoring stations. Her work has been profiled in dozens of reports on TV, radio, podcasts and in thousands of print and online articles. She is the host of the BioAudio podcast, a free alternative to textbooks provided to students and the public (apple, spotify), and https://bioaudio.buzzsprout.com/2234324

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/gpy42U39FM

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon.  The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.