Gathering genetic materials from treetops in tropical rainforests can be a near-impossible activity to carry out safely by hand. That is why scientists have developed a system that enables a drone to do the job, with out even touching the bushes itself.
If you wish to know which animals are current in an space, a comparatively new means of discovering out includes gathering and analyzing what is named environmental DNA – or eDNA, for brief.
eDNA is discovered within the organic substances akin to feces and sloughed pores and skin that animals frequently forged off into their setting. Which means that in case you analyze a water, soil and even air pattern gathered from that setting, you may inform which animals are current within the space just by seeing which species’ eDNA reveals up within the pattern.
Over the previous a number of years, eDNA evaluation has been used for every thing from assessing insect biodiversity to searching for the Loch Ness monster. Final yr, scientists from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich analysis institute utilized the technique to see which species make their dwelling excessive up within the forest cover.
ETH Zurich
So as to take action, the group constructed a quadcopter drone with adhesive strips on its underside. When the plane gently landed on branches, genetic materials which was current on these branches received transferred onto the adhesive for subsequent evaluation.
Whereas this was a significantly sooner, safer and simpler different to sending biologists up into the treetops, there was nonetheless a danger of damaging the drone and/or the tree within the occasion of an unintentional laborious collision. Moreover, samples might solely be gathered from branches on which the plane might land.
That is the place the brand new system is available in.
Developed by a group led by ETH Zurich robotics PhD scholar Steffen Kirchgeorg, it makes use of a flat, disc-shaped cloth probe that’s lowered on a tether from a winch mounted on the underside of a quadcopter.
Environmental Robotics Lab
As that drone hovers in place safely above the treetops, the probe makes its means down by way of the foliage, brushing towards loads of leaves and branches because it does so. As soon as the probe has had an opportunity to assemble some good eDNA, it is winched again as much as the drone. The copter then returns to its base, so the probe may be eliminated and its contents analyzed.
In proof-of-concept demonstrations carried out in a rainforest in Southeast Asia, Kirchgeorg and colleagues remotely managed the drone through a dwell feed from its onboard digicam, flying it past their line of sight to assemble 10 samples from the forest cover. The samples have been discovered to comprise the eDNA of 152 completely different species. Most of those have been spiders and bugs akin to ants and termites, though the eDNA of the long-tailed macaque monkey was additionally current.
Environmental Robotics Lab
“If we would like folks to guard nature, we have to inform them what we are literally defending – with our answer, we hope to raised perceive the life within the cover,” says Kirchgeorg.
A paper on the research was lately printed within the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The system may be seen in eDNA-gathering motion, within the silent video beneath.
Drone-based system makes use of a material probe to assemble eDNA from treetops
Supply: American Chemical Society
