Real-time Quantitative Detection of eDNA across varying ecosystem scales

The applications of eDNA fall predominately into two categories. Single-species detection and surveillance is commonly used to detect DNA of cryptic, invasive and endangered species, inferring the presence of the species within the environment. This is particularly useful when traditional surveillance techniques provide limited data. In contrast to these applications, isolating DNA from environmental samples can produce a near- complete snapshot of an ecosystem, now commonly referred to as ‘metabarcoding’. Using metabarcoding, multiple species DNA or ‘barcodes’ are simultaneously amplified in the PCR process providing vast amounts of genetic data from a single environmental sample.