BARCODRAIN : développement d’outils basés sur l’ADN environnemental des eaux de pluie et de ruissellement pour le suivi de la biodiversité terrestre en milieu tropical
Project objectives
BARCODRAIN aims to develop novel high-throughput biodiversity detection and inventory tools based on environmental DNA (eDNA) contained in rain and runoff waters. These tools are designed to be simple, easy, and rapid for implementation by local environmental stakeholders, aiming to improve the sampling, detection, and monitoring of terrestrial and semi-aquatic biodiversity in French Guiana.
Laboratory members involved
Coordination: Amaya Iribar et Lucie Zinger.
Other members involved: Anne-Sophie Benoiston, Jérôme Chave, Yves Cuenot, Lucie Moreau, Jérémy Raynaud, and Uxue Suescun.
Actions
With the increasing anthropogenic pressures faced by French Guiana's natural habitats, improving biodiversity knowledge and monitoring is a major challenge. However, biodiversity monitoring remains challenging in French Guiana's ecosystems, which harbor an extremely rich but still partially unknown and that is complex to inventory. Besides, this monitoring is often focused on a single clade and relies on increasingly rare taxonomic expertise. Consequently, inventories in such environments remain difficult, tedious, and expensive to carry out. The BARCODRAIN project aims to improve the monitoring of French Guiana’s terrestrial multi-trophic biodiversity (i.e. vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants) by developing innovative inventory methods based on eDNA from rain- and runoff waters. Indeed, rain transports and concentrates DNA from the tissues, excretions, and/or excrements of organisms present in the soil or in the canopy. Using this eDNA fraction together with molecular metabarcoding thus offers the prospect of inventorying tropical terrestrial diversity across a wide taxonomic spectrum in a rapid, inexpensive, high-throughput, and large-scale spatial manner.
To achieve this objective, BARCODRAIN evaluates the performance of rain- and runoff waters eDNA sensors made of different materials (including some simple ones such as cotton or ceramics) and sampling strategies to inventory biodiversity and detect species of high conservation value, or invasive ones, in five emblematic habitats of French Guiana with strong rainfall and vegetation structure gradients. BARCODRAIN also aims to contribute to the completion of reference DNA sequence banks for French Guiana. Finally, to facilitate the transfer of rain/runoff water eDNA-based methods to environmental stakeholders, BARCODRAIN is developing in situ tools that allow for direct diagnosis at the field.
Funding period
3 years (2023-2026)
Partners
- Laboratoires EcoFoG (Kourou)
- LECA (Grenoble)
- ISYEB (Paris)
- CEFE (Montpellier)
- AMAP (Montpellier)
- BioGeco (Bordeaux)
- LEHNA (Villeurbanne)
- Zoo de Cayenne
- Herbier de Cayenne
- Conservatoire des Espaces Naturels de Guyane
Funder
BARCODRAIN is funded by the « Office Français de la Biodiversité » as part of the 2022 call for expressions of interest « Developing terrestrial biodiversity monitoring in overseas France ».