July newsletter: it's artsy, fishy and fiery!

We've hit 2000 samples with results available for you. ASPIRE and CIB are collecting thousands more. LA River art inspired by eDNA is at BAMPFA, and drone and soundscapes enrich a floodplain project.

Dear CALeDNA friends,

Lots going on! If you need something to do tomorrow morning, join us on the LA River at 10AM or at 2PM! Locations and sign up here: https://data.ucedna.com/events

We’ve hit a milestone with 2000 samples with eDNA results now on our website. This includes several new projects for you to check out:

1. Fish surveys from California and Washington oyster farms and adjacent mudflats and seagrass beds. This project is led by Kristine Kroeker at UCSC and lab manager Sean Johnson did the lab work. We are analyzing the data to look at where fish are spending time and how biodiversity varies in these different habitats. There are Spring and Summer seasons of samples to compare. In California, we see total species richness decreases from Spring to Summer, and in Washington, we see species richness increases from Spring to Summer. We found species that are very hard to detect with visual surveys like Pacific Herring and the Slender Cockscomb.

2. Pt. Reyes National Seashore biodiversity surveys. Whilst looking for Northern Tidewater Goby, we documented thousands of taxa across Pt. Reyes in water and sediment DNA. Different parts of the preserve have similar species richness and community composition except for bacteria. Does this mean the tidewater goby has lots of suitable habitat? We did also find that pH and salinity significantly alter communities.

3. Grayson Riverbend is a habitat being restored, where much of it is fallow former cornfields. UC Merced graduate student Jacob Nesslage (advisor Erin Hestir) collaborated with UCSC’s Jen Quick-Cleveland to survey transects across the agriculture land and natural riparian habitat. Here we don’t find much for fish other than mosquitofish but we do have other mammals like rabbits and beavers! More interesting is that the microbial plant pathogens are still higher in the fallow agricultural land. Let’s see if things change after the historic flood events of earlier this year. The floodplain transition is being documented by the UCSC art group “ARIL” and cinematographer Jordan McNeile, with support from the UCSC OpenLab. They used drones to make this video to show you the site as it still has excess water from the floods. Soundscapes and other in-situ biodiversity measures led by ARIL will be integrated into the eDNA analysis along with high resolution remote sensing data brought by the Merced team.

The ASPIRE program supported eight students to make 1000 collections last summer from wildfire-prone sites. These are are safe in our frozen collections and available for research. To see the sites, 800 samples are within this field project and 200 more are embedded in others. Many of the sites already experienced wildfire and other disturbances, so analysis should give us more clues as to how biodiversity shifts with fire. One high risk site was Swanton Pacific Ranch near Santa Cruz. We just got sequence data back these Swanton Ranch samples so stay alert for results! If you work on these kinds of lands please get in touch. We’d love to learn what matters to you and what new questions we can explore with eDNA data across the landscape.

One thing we’re really excited for is that ASPIRE sample collection last year motivated other field expeditions to collect 1000 more CALeDNA samples this year from all over the state! This is being coordinated by the California Institute for Biodiversity and is now underway. All of these collections will be available for research, where you can check out a frozen soil sample or come here to our UCSC headquarters in person to study them. Each frozen sample is a time capsule from a specific place and time. We’re not going to be looking just at wildfire change, but also at invertebrate and fungal diversity, seeking leads for where new species are.

This is of state interest. Senator Laird visited the collections himself in September and toured the lab, and we’ve been grateful for encouraging feedback from others in government and other organizations from the California Biodiversity Network to the California Dept of Fish and Wildlife and YOU!

Wishing you a beautiful summer. Stay hydrated!

Cheers,

the CALeDNA team