Guidance and Best Practice for DNA-based Species Monitoring

Tender description

The overall aim is to help facilitate greater use of DNA-based monitoring of species and ecosystems by environmental public bodies. This will be achieved by providing information and guidance to improve understanding of how decisions in the application of DNA-based methods can influence results, and by identifying practices that allow cost-effective DNA-based methods to be developed and implemented with confidence. 3. Project Background DNA-based methods for detecting and identifying species have many potential applications within the Defra group of organisations (APHA, Defra, CEFAS, Environment Agency, Forest Research, JNCC, Kew, MMO, Natural England). These include surveillance for invasive or rare species, characterising communities to assess the condition of protected sites, understanding the effects of management interventions, and describing the functioning and resilience of ecosystems. However, uptake for operational use faces several challenges. To contribute to addressing these challenges, Defra have established a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to support greater uptake of DNA-based methods for monitoring species and ecosystems. The CoE brings together expertise from across the Defra group of organisations to identify and tackle shared priorities through a series of projects. A major difficulty for several CoE organisations is the diversity of potential approaches to using DNA-based monitoring methods and the way these differing approaches can affect results ,2. This is a problem because organisations require robust methods that produce spatially and temporally comparable results (e.g. long-term monitoring, informing conservation actions, guiding environmental management and regulation, reporting under intentional biodiversity agreements). Accordingly, initial consultation within the CoE highlighted uncertainty over methods as a key barrier to uptake across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial systems. Furthermore, government organisations have constraints that mean the ideal solution may not be logistically or financially viable to apply at the required scale. For operational use, it is therefore also important to identify methodological areas where pragmatic decisions can be made that help alleviate these constraints without overly compromising results. 4. Project Objectives To meet the overall aim of this project (Section 2), the objectives are to: • Clarify uncertainties that public bodies have over how the approach to sample collection, storage, processing, and data analysis affect the results of DNA-based monitoring, and identify any areas of remaining uncertainty • Understand the requirements and operational constraints that public bodies have in relation to using DNA for monitoring • Provide guidance to support public bodies commissioning the development of DNA-based monitoring methods • Scope the content and structure for a best practice guidance document to support the operational use of DNA in monitoring species and communities.