In the rainforest, much of life dwells in the tree canopy. But getting up there to study it isn’t easy. By the time a human has clumsily lumbered up from the ground, most of the critters have scattered. So a team of researchers had an idea: Why not collect the rainwater that trickles down through the trees and analyze the water for traces of DNA? Every living thing, from the tiniest moss to the largest monkey, sheds microscopic pieces of itself. Cells slough off. Saliva droplets land on leaves. Waste products get deposited on branches. When rain falls through the forest canopy, it washes all this biological debris downward, creating what scientists call rainwash, a carrier of environmental DNA, or eDNA. To gather the rainwash, researchers repurposed ordinary umbrellas, drilling holes and attaching tubes to funnel water into collection devices, and hung them under trees in the Amazonian forests of French Guiana. Researchers repurposed umbrellas into low-cost rainwash collectors to study life in the canopy of French Guiana. Image courtesy of Amaia Iribar, CRBE, CNRS “We wanted to develop something low cost and easily usable for all the local actors for conservation,” Lucie Zinger, a researcher at the France-based Center for Biodiversity and Environmental Research (CBRE), told Mongabay. “So, the idea of the umbrella comes from something cheap and easy to use.” The resulting study, published in Science Advances, found that the rainwater eDNA method detected a remarkable diversity of life in the canopy: 562 different species across plants, vertebrates…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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