Environmental DNA (eDNA) in Ecology
A Special Issue of Genes (ISSN 2073-4425) belonging to the section "Genes & Environments".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 August 2027
Editor
Interests: environmental DNA (eDNA); metabarcoding; molecular ecology; biodiversity monitoring; conservation genetics; fisheries and wildlife management; bioinformatics and computational ecology; PCR-based species detection
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Environmental DNA (eDNA) has rapidly become one of the most powerful tools in modern ecology, enabling non-invasive detection and monitoring of species and communities across aquatic, terrestrial, and even aerial environments. By capturing genetic material shed into the environment, eDNA metabarcoding and targeted assays allow researchers to survey biodiversity, track rare or invasive species, and assess ecosystem health at spatial and temporal scales that traditional sampling methods cannot easily achieve. Despite this promise, the application of eDNA continues to grapple with methodological challenges, including primer bias, false-positive/false-negative detections, degradation and transport dynamics, standardization of bioinformatic pipelines, and the difficulty of interpreting the complex, multidimensional datasets these pipelines generate.
This Special Issue welcomes original research, reviews, and methodological studies that advance the application of eDNA in ecological research, from marker-gene surveys to genome- and meta-genome-scale analyses, across freshwater, marine, and terrestrial systems, with particular interest in new molecular or bioinformatic tools, cross-system comparisons, the integration of eDNA with traditional monitoring approaches, and applications of eDNA-derived genetic and genomic data to support conservation, fisheries, and natural resource management.
Dr. Jeffrey A. Miller
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- environmental DNA
- eDNA
- metabarcoding
- biodiversity monitoring
- molecular ecology
- species detection
- bioinformatics
- PCR and sequencing bias
- conservation genetics
- fisheries, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystem management/montoring
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