OCN 780 Seminar | The Hidden Half: Integrating Environmental DNA With Visual Surveys to Quantify Fish Biomass | Whitney

Presenter: Dr. Jonathan Whitney*

Title: The Hidden Half: Integrating Environmental DNA With Visual Surveys to Quantify Fish Biomass

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is offering new ways to fill long-standing gaps in traditional ocean surveys that depend on divers, nets, ships, and acoustics. Our team at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and collaborators are developing integrated frameworks that couple eDNA with traditional methods to expand the scale, resolution, and ecological completeness of observations across pelagic, coral reef, and deep-benthic ecosystems. Our clearest demonstration of this potential thus far comes from a case study on coral reefs, ecosystems where visual surveys remain indispensable yet contain obscured biodiversity and biomass. Here I present results of a collaborative joint Bayesian model that integrates single-locus eDNA metabarcoding with diver surveys and high-resolution reef habitat mapping, to uncover a previously “hidden half” of reef fish assemblages. This quantitative synthesis reveals three-fold higher species richness and substantial increases in biomass for hard-to-observe guilds including cryptobenthic fishes, nocturnal predators, roaming herbivores, and planktivores. Building on this case study, we are extending these integrated approaches across ecosystems and developing the infrastructure needed to make eDNA datastreams operational, including analytical workflows, reference libraries, and autonomous sampling technologies. In this seminar, I will highlight how integrating eDNA with traditional surveys provides new ecological insight, improves fisheries-independent assessments, and builds a scalable foundation for future ocean observing systems capable of tracking biomass, biodiversity, and ecosystem change across entire seascapes.


*Affiliate Graduate Faculty candidate

Location: MSB-100

Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm