PeerJ Award Winner at 2025 eDNA Conference

We’re thrilled to share the success of the 2nd AU-NZ eDNA Conference held between 18 – 21 February 2025 in Wellington! It was fantastic to see 321 attendees from 25 different countries. The conference was a vibrant showcase of environmental DNA science, where students, researchers, and professionals from various sectors came together.

There were over 100 students and early career researchers at the conference, bringing fresh ideas and energy. The discussions were lively and full of new insights, reflecting the creativity and enthusiasm that is driving our field forward. It was great to see so much networking and collaboration happening between researchers, industry leaders, government representatives, and community users.

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Introducing the SeDNAs Hub – the publishing home of the Southern eDNA Society.

The SeDNAs Hub showcases cutting-edge research, innovations, and applications in environmental DNA (eDNA) from SeDNAs members and the global eDNA research community. Presubmissions will be assessed for community relevance by a dedicated Hub Editorial Team, with full submissions peer reviewed by the PeerJ Life & Environment journal.

Join the Hub Community today!

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Nick Foster Predator Ecologist, Zero Invasive Predators (ZIP), New Zealand.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?

I am a passionate conservationist who is actively engaged with the invasive species challenges that Aotearoa / New Zealand is faced with. eDNA is an exciting new tool that has a potentially enormous application in this field, and my interest centred around learning how it can advance and improve our ability to remove invasive species from large wilderness areas, allowing biodiversity to thrive in their absence.

Can you briefly explain the research you presented at the eDNA Conference?

I was privileged to give a talk at the 2nd Australian and New Zealand Environmental DNA Conference about a series of field trials that have aimed to establish eDNA sampling in the real world of terrestrial invasive small mammal elimination. The goal of this collective research was to learn what eDNA can currently achieve in the measurement and surveillance of invasive small mammal species, where it is falling short in what we would like it to do, and to identify immediate leads to advance sampling techniques. This has included testing different sampling methods, deployment durations, understanding how long it takes for the signal of carcasses to decline beyond detectability, correlating eDNA metrics to traditional density estimates, and estimating sampling effort for different densities of invasive species.

How will you continue to build on this research?

The next steps for us at ZIP, with our partners at Otago University, Wilderlab, The National Wildlife Research Center, The University of Auckland and others, is to continue this research and build more confidence around our findings. There are some exciting avenues to explore, including testing a qPCR assay specific for the Rattus genus, and to understand the importance of precipitation when sampling riverine environments for terrestrial mammal species. Perhaps most exciting is that we can now implement eDNA sampling as a field technique in some circumstances!