‘Game changer’: New plan to save Australia’s species

An ambitious new CSIRO project aims to build a comprehensive overview of Australia’s biodiversity, using new technology to record every single planet and animal species.

The DNA of every single Australian species – plant and animal, marine and land-based – will be catalogued as part of an ambitious new project by the CSIRO.

The National Biodiversity DNA Library, announced on Wednesday, will get its kickstart with the cataloguing of approximately 5500 species of fish and other vertebrates in Australia’s oceans, thanks to environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis being undertaken by Twiggy Forest’s Minderoo Foundation.

Rather than the gruesome processes of yesteryear, when individual animals were caught, killed and then preserved in formaldehyde, eDNA analysis enables species to be catalogued from the traces of DNA they leave behind in their environment – a bit like Covid wastewater testing.

Minderoo Foundation researchers Eric Raes and Sam Thompson collect water samples for eDNA analysis Minderoo Foundation researchers Eric Raes and Sam Thompson collect water samples for eDNA analysis near the Abrolhos Archipelago off the coast of Western Australia. Source: Minderoo Foundation OceanOmics

CSIRO’s project director Dr Jenny Giles said eDNA analysis could potentially revolutionise biodiversity monitoring.

“Monitoring biodiversity and detecting pests is extremely important, but it’s hard to do and is

expensive in a country as large as Australia. eDNA surveys could change that,” Dr Giles said.

“eDNA surveys are increasingly being used to detect and monitor species, but only a tiny fraction of Australian species have sufficient reference data available to support this approach. This means most eDNA we collect can’t currently be assigned to a species.”

Dr Steve Burnell, director of the Minderoo Foundation’s OceanOmics program, said eDNA was a “game changer for conservation”.

“eDNA is probably the most exciting tool on the horizon for how we can understand life in the ocean and protect it better,” he said.

The technology could also potentially be used to assess the abundance or scarcity of species, providing data for the conservation and sustainable management of fish stocks, Dr Burnell said.

eDNA could also be used to track “tropicalisation” – the warming of the world’s oceans, leading to the depletion of some species, and the relocation of others, Dr Burnell said.

Cataloguing all 5500 vertebrate species in Australia’s oceans was going to be a “vast task,” he said, but the process could also help provide evidence of a species’ survival even if it had not been sighted, or caught on the end of a line, for some time.

Dr Steve Burnell from the Minderoo Foundation. Picture: Supplied

Dr Jenny Giles from the CSIRO. Picture: Supplied

“Many of these species are small, they’re cryptic and not easily observed, so finding them via eDNA can give us some encouragement that they are still there. It may still be horrendously threatened … but eDNA could be a very powerful tool for telling us it’s there. Or it could be just as powerful in telling us that [a species is] absent from an area where it once was previously quite common,” Dr Burnell said.

The announcement of the National Biodiversity DNA Library comes a day after Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek released a new Threatened Species Action Plan, with a goal of zero new extinctions.

Originally published as ‘Game changer’: New plan to save Australia’s species