Ecosystem dynamics

Ecosystems are not static — they are constantly changing, shaped by interactions between climate, land use, species interactions, and environmental variability. Airborne environmental DNA provides a way to observe these dynamics directly by capturing changes in whole ecological communities over time.

By analysing DNA preserved in archived air filters, we can reconstruct how ecosystems have changed across seasons and decades. This includes both gradual long-term shifts, such as changes driven by climate trends or land-use change, and rapid seasonal fluctuations that reflect biological cycles like flowering, migration, or microbial activity.

Because airborne DNA captures many groups of organisms simultaneously, it allows us to study ecosystems as integrated systems rather than collections of individual species. This is important because many ecological processes emerge from interactions between organisms, rather than from any single species alone.

Over longer time scales, these data reveal how communities reorganise in response to environmental change. Some species become more dominant while others decline, and entire community structures can shift as conditions change. These patterns can be linked to external drivers such as temperature, precipitation, land management, and habitat modification.

This approach provides a unique opportunity to study ecosystem dynamics at a level of detail that bridges the gap between short-term ecological monitoring and long-term environmental change.