fundamentals of eDNA

Regarding the Cristecu & Herbert (2018) review, while I was already familiar with a significant number of the points discussed, I was surprised that even though much progress has been made in the realm of eDNA research in the last decade, such methods have failed to have been properly adopted for actual management decisions in fields where it has great potential.

I was already aware that eDNA has many assumptions, biases and confounding factors throughout its methodology, which requires comprehensive validation to be generalisable, but I would have thought that at the very least, simpler eDNA approaches such as targeted studies have already reached a stage where they can be informative for management decisions (e.g. presence/absence of endangered and invasive species).

One of the major challenges in eDNA in the moment is determining abundance of species of interest, and I am interested in learning more about how to derive an accurate estimate of this parameter, be it through looking at the relationship between gene copy numbers and read abundances, or looking at other factors such as allele frequencies (e.g. SNPs).

As for the TallBear (2013) paper, coming from Singapore where diverse sub-ethnic groups have become homogenised within the last few decades into broad racial ‘categories’ of Chinese, Malay and Indian respectively; learning about indigenous peoples and articulation, as well as their relationships with authority and complications brought about by political and economic power, has been relatively novel to me.

Nevertheless, I someday intend to work in tropical South-East Asia, and while indigenous rights have not been advanced to the same extent as in North America at the moment, this paper provides much food for thought as how to engage indigenous peoples in effective and equitable partnership.

In addition, the concept of indigeneity as a people arising from and forming a relationship with the land struck me as especially poignant. I agree with that author that indigeneity is ever-evolving and should be based on holistic criteria rather than overly focusing on nature or nurture. Such criteria may also have some relevance for other forms of self-identification.