Dr Miwa Takahashi1, Dr Tobias Guldberg Frøslev2, Dr Bettina Thalinger3, Dr Katy Klymus4, Dr Joana Pauperio5, Dr Cecilia Villacorta-Rath6, Dr Gareth Jenkins7, Dr Martin Laporte8, Dr Christopher Jerde9, Dr Sachit Rajbhandari1, Dr Thomas Stjernegaard Jeppesen2, Dr Andrew Bissett1, Dr Bruce Deagle1, Dr Erin Hahn1, Dr Peggy Newman1, Dr Suk Yee Yong1, Dr Lynn M Schriml10, Dr Katherine Silliman11, Dr Sean P Jungbluth11,12, Dr Luke R Thompson11,12, Dr Caren C Helbing13, Dr Peter Woollard5, Dr Christopher I Hunter14, Dr Stephen Formel15, Dr Oliver Berry1
1CSIRO, , Australia, 2Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Copenhagen, Denmark, 3Department of Zoology, University of Innsbruck, , Austria, 4U.S. Geological Survey, Columbia Environmental Research Center, Columbia, USA, 5European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute, , UK, 6Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER), James Cook University, , Australia, 7John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Oxford, UK, 8Ministère de l’Environnement, de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques, de la Faune et des Parcs, Québec, Canada, 9Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, 10University of Maryland School of Medicine, Institute for Genome Sciences, Genomic Standards Consortium, Baltimore, USA, 11National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Miami, USA, 12Northern Gulf Institute, Mississippi State University, Starkville, USA, 13Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada, 14GigaScience Press, Hong Kong, , 15U.S. Geological Survey; Science Analytics and Synthesis, New Orleans, USA
Biography:
Miwa earned her undergraduate and honours degrees in Marine Biology from James Cook University. After gaining diverse experiences through work and travel, she completed a PhD in Marine Ecology at Curtin University, where she was introduced to the world of environmental DNA (eDNA). Driven by a passion for leveraging eDNA to protect the natural world, Miwa is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, where she leads a global initiative to “make eDNA data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)”.
Abstract:
Reversing global biodiversity loss will require transformational human actions and robust measurements of their effectiveness. Diversity assessment using environmental DNA (eDNA) has emerged as a cutting-edge technique with the potential to address the challenges of measuring biodiversity. Vast quantities of eDNA sequences and eDNA-based species detections are generated in scientific studies. Encouragingly, most eDNA-based data from published papers are now public. However, these datasets are typically stored in a variety of repositories in multiple formats, hindering their re-use. Ensuring the publication of eDNA data following the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles would revolutionise environmental assessment, including monitoring of biodiversity, individual species, and interactions across extensive spatial and temporal scales, and generate critical knowledge for evidence-based management. Dissemination of FAIR eDNA data requires standardised data formats and vocabularies, cyberinfrastructures, guidelines, data sharing policy, and collaboration among scientists and institutions. While some existing data standards and infrastructures address these needs, multiple challenges remain, including accommodating the unique attributes associated with eDNA-based data. In this talk, I share a best practice guide for formatting and publishing eDNA-based data, developed by an international, multidisciplinary working-group comprising researchers, journal editors, and biodiversity and ‘omics data publishers. We identify required data types, formats and metadata checklists through reviewing and integrating existing data standards, devising subject-specific vocabularies, and introducing additional terms to accommodate the distinctive properties of eDNA-based data. Adopting FAIR practice for publishing eDNA-based data will benefit individual researchers, the eDNA communities, and maximise eDNA’s potential to contribute to environmental management.