City life: airborne DNA metagenomic biodiversity monitoring reveals dynamic changes across time and space
- 1Natural History Museum
Abstract
Airborne environmental DNA can capture biodiversity across the tree of life, but low sample biomass makes rapid, untargeted detection technically challenging. We combined 45-min air collection, nanopore sequencing and real-time taxonomic analysis in a shotgun metagenomic workflow capable of producing results within 3 hours. Across 77 samples from 13 London sites, including a year of weekly sampling at the Natural History Museum Wildlife Garden, we detected 1,916 species spanning bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. Communities varied spatially and seasonally, shifting from plant dominance in spring to ascomycete dominance in summer and basidiomycete dominance in late autumn and winter. Plant read abundance increased with upwind vegetation, linking airborne signals to surrounding habitat. Detection of catalogued garden plants depended on reference availability, dispersal biology, plant size and proximity to the collector. Together, these findings establish airborne shotgun metagenomics as a platform for rapid, repeated and scalable biodiversity assessment across space and time.
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BibTeX
@misc{peel2026city,
title = {{City life: airborne DNA metagenomic biodiversity monitoring reveals dynamic changes across time and space}},
author = {N. Peel and P. Cuber and D. Heavens and M. Giolai and S. Martin and M. Alston and D. Chooneea and P. Aanstad and R. Misra and R. M. Leggett and M. D. Clark},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.64898/2026.08.31.747859},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.31.747859v1},
note = {CC BY-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - City life: airborne DNA metagenomic biodiversity monitoring reveals dynamic changes across time and space
AU - N. Peel
AU - P. Cuber
AU - D. Heavens
AU - M. Giolai
AU - S. Martin
AU - M. Alston
AU - D. Chooneea
AU - P. Aanstad
AU - R. Misra
AU - R. M. Leggett
AU - M. D. Clark
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/31
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.08.31.747859
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.31.747859v1
AB - Airborne environmental DNA can capture biodiversity across the tree of life, but low sample biomass makes rapid, untargeted detection technically challenging. We combined 45-min air collection, nanopore sequencing and real-time taxonomic analysis in a shotgun metagenomic workflow capable of producing results within 3 hours. Across 77 samples from 13 London sites, including a year of weekly sampling at the Natural History Museum Wildlife Garden, we detected 1,916 species spanning bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. Communities varied spatially and seasonally, shifting from plant dominance in spring to ascomycete dominance in summer and basidiomycete dominance in late autumn and winter. Plant read abundance increased with upwind vegetation, linking airborne signals to surrounding habitat. Detection of catalogued garden plants depended on reference availability, dispersal biology, plant size and proximity to the collector. Together, these findings establish airborne shotgun metagenomics as a platform for rapid, repeated and scalable biodiversity assessment across space and time.
ER -