B-aware

Swedish national preparedness is facing new challenges. Some of those includes introduction of pathogens, invasive species and a decline in biodiversity.

These threaten the health of people, livestock, crops and ecosystem services in general, thereby also our economy, production of food and products, and quality of life.

Our ability to monitor and forecast these threats are limited and often restrict us to react to an outbreak that is already upon us. To define the normal background, detect trends and make forecasts, long timeseries are urgently needed.

We here propose to use a 60-year archive of air filters collected weekly across Sweden to monitor trends and make projections for biological threats to our society.

We show with preliminary data that the extreme volumes of air that pass these filters and the way they have been archived make it possible to extract DNA and through unbiased shotgun sequencing, identify all types of organisms (bacteria, fungi, plants and animals) from all types of habitats in a wide area.

Focusing on a highly productive area of Sweden the project will deliver 10-year trends of a large number of individual organisms as well as general biodiversity, and detailed trends, the influence of climate on those trends as well as forecasting models for a number of current pathogen threats.

In the long term, we will pave the way for a continuous monitoring system for harmful organisms and biodiversity that covers Sweden from north to south.