Environmental DNA from the past

Abstract

All organisms leave DNA traces in their environments, and these traces can be preserved over a very long time under the right conditions. We can use such ancient environmental DNA to identify species from the past, and to reconstruct time series of entire ecological communities. This provides unprecedented insights into biodiversity change in numerous past ecosystems. Ancient environmental DNA is becoming a standard approach in ecology, and it is increasingly used to provide temporal biodiversity data, from the effects of ancient climate change to understanding biodiversity baselines before the intensive human impact of the Anthropocene.