Scientists took a rare chance to prove we can quantify biodiversity by 'testing the water'

While extraction of DNA from water samples provides a convenient and non-invasive way to study aquatic biodiversity, reliable evidence that this approach is accurate enough to estimate the number of fish per species and their biomass in natural habitats, is still lacking. A new study, published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, demonstrates the high precision of the method, after comparing environmental DNA data with manually collected information from a fishery farm.