eDNA and the epistemics of biodiversity data: material technologies, data regimes, and environmental governance

I am proposing a qualitative study of eDNA, an influential new biodiversity monitoring technology that is changing the ways in which ecosystems are understood, governed, and shaped.

The project addresses an important gap in the literature and will be relevant to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers linked to biodiversity conservation and nature restoration. Species leave molecular traces of their presence across their environments. Ecologists analyse this environmental DNA, or eDNA, in order to determine an ecosystem's inhabitants.

Over the past decade, eDNA technologies have moved from the periphery of the ecological sciences to become a leading force in novel biodiversity monitoring. eDNA offers remarkable benefits.

It is quicker and less invasive than conventional surveying, while also promising to avoid the risk of a field ecologist overlooking a hard-to-detect species. However, its impact goes beyond improving ecosystem monitoring.

By offering insights into hitherto unknowable areas of an ecosystem and producing novel streams of species data, eDNA fundamentally changes how biodiversity knowledge is produced. Its proponents are correct to term it a 'revolutionary' technology.

The dominance of market-based nature restoration means that the biodiversity data that eDNA xcels in is a cornerstone of the UK's public and private environmental governance. Consequently, as eDNA science has developed, it has also been rapidly commercialised.

Previous technological advances in environmental measurement, for example, the emergence of satellite imagery in the 1960s, recast how the environment came to be understood and governed. eDNA is now similarly reshaping policymaking and, in doing so, determining the types of ecosystems that can be created through nature restoration - as well as those that are foreclosed.

Although eDNA is established as an influential technology among ecologists, conservation biologists, and policymakers, its recent emergence means that an in-depth social science study is missing from the research.

Building on relevant critical work from human geography and science and technology studies, this project responds directly to this gap.

In it, I will use a mixture of qualitative methods to critically explore the development and deployment of eDNA and its socio-ecological implications.

The research will be structured around four points of investigation that will examine the production and legitimisation of eDNA-derived biodiversity knowledge, as well as the entanglement of eDNA with public and corporate environmental governance.

The outputs of this project will extend the critical literatures engaged with technologically mediated environmental governance and inform the interdisciplinary work done at the interface of environmental science and policy.