NatureMetrics launches biodiversity platform based on environmental DNA

The business sector has had a fraught relationship with conservation. While many companies are now pushing to make their products and operations less damaging to the environment, the private sector, broadly speaking, has made life harder for the world’s complex ecosystems and the organisms in them.

For those companies looking to understand their environmental impacts better, NatureMetrics, a UK-based company, recently launched a service that can potentially inform conservation efforts in the private sector. The company is in the early stages of launching a subscription service that lets corporations regularly check their sites for biodiversity and keep an eye on any changes—good or bad—their activities have.

“You need to be doing monitoring over time in a structured way with enough samples to give you statistical significance,” Katie Critchlow, NatureMetrics’ CEO, told Ars.

NatureMetrics creates kits to check for environmental DNA (eDNA) in an area, which should indicate the species present. According to Critchlow, these kits are simple to use; the process involves collecting a sample of water or soil from an area, then sending the sample back to NatureMetrics for analysis.

The kits allow companies to check the relative abundance of species in an area. Critchlow noted that the kits don’t enable users to get an exact population size, but they can tell users which species are more common than others in an area. She added that companies or other users could do field work, like spotting animals, to get a better sense of population size.

“What eDNA brings to the party”

The eDNA company announced it would launch a new subscription-based service at this year’s UN Biodiversity Conference, called COP15, which brings governments and various groups from almost 190 countries together. Companies can use the kits to test in areas they operate in, and NatureMetrics will analyze the sample and provide biodiversity insights via an online platform.

The service is geared toward companies with “site-based assets,” Critchlow said. A mining company could use it to check for endangered species in a site they hope to work in or use it several times over a year to see how biodiversity is changing in the area, for instance. If said mining company detected a rare species in one location on its site, it could avoid that area.

She said it also allows researchers to identify species that are smaller or perhaps less visible than, say, birds or large mammals. While these smaller species—insects or plants, for example—are perhaps less charismatic, they often play essential roles in their respective habitats, like ensuring soil fertility.

“This is what eDNA brings to the party,” Critchlow said.

There are other platforms companies can use to see baseline biodiversity data on their sites—The Global Biodiversity Information Facility, for instance. However, services like this may use older data that isn’t updated regularly (in the way NatureMetrics’ service offers). Other species monitoring platforms are based on traps and sightings, which may miss out on smaller or otherwise harder-to-find species.

The service is still in its early launch stages. They hope that more companies will join in over time. The minimum amount for companies is around 10,000 pounds (about $12,000), but it can go upwards of 100,000 pounds (about $120,000) for businesses with larger or multiple sites. The subscription they launched is still in beta testing, but the company hopes that the first clients will be using it in the new year and that companies will be able to start seeing their data on the online platform the following year. Mining company Anglo American is expressing interest in the service, Critchlow said.

Doing it right

According to Melania Cristescu, professor in McGill University’s Department of Biology and Canada Research Chair in Ecological Genomics, the field of eDNA monitoring is getting to a point where it can provide potentially useful information. However, we need to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

“The technologies that are based on environmental DNA… they keep evolving,” she said.

She noted that the tech is generally inexpensive, and the kits used to test for eDNA tend to be non-invasive in the environment. Like Critchlow noted, Cristescu said that eDNA techniques could also be used to identify species that are difficult to spot, either because they are nocturnal or prone to hiding. It can also differentiate between species that appear to be similar in appearance but are genetically quite different. Further, eDNA data could be used in the early identification of invasive species in a habitat.

There are a few caveats, however. For instance, eDNA labs need to have strong sterility protocols to avoid cross-contamination with DNA from outside sources. The kits used to collect eDNA samples also risk contamination with outside DNA, resulting in false positives.

However, Cristescu noted that training lay people in sample collection is not particularly hard. Critchlow said that the kits NatureMetrics produce are extremely easy to use and that they have been deployed in various citizen science efforts in the past—they’re simple enough that her kids can use them. “It’s like pushing water through a syringe,” she said.

There is potential for outside contamination, however. For example, if someone eats fish for lunch, DNA from the fish could end up in the environment they are testing and as such, that species may appear in the results, creating a false positive, Critchlow said.