Kraw Lecture: Learning Earth’s Biodiversity via Space and eDNA

The California DNA Program (CALeDNA), launched from the University of California in 2017, has been tackling the massive disconnection in scales of measuring nature from satellite-based sensing down to DNA in a gram of soil or water. Through dozens of collaborative projects around the world, CALeDNA lab scientists have harmonized different ways of observing biodiversity from microbes to plants and mammals. UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where CALeDNA is headquartered, now houses over 50,000 CALeDNA environmental sample collections, a thriving startup partnership, and an eDNA service and R&D lab that serves most national and CA state agencies that monitor nature. In this presentation, Rachel Meyer will demonstrate the challenges of connecting the microscopic to regional scales across all kingdoms of life for two central purposes: monitoring sensitive habitat change and estimating habitat ‘health’.