Snow DNA Reveals New Way to Track Animals in Winter | Short Film Showcase

I've learned to appreciate the quiet in the cold. It's just not something you did in any other place and in any other season. We're the loudest things out there, thinking about rare species. They're such an important part of the landscape and something that we work so hard to preserve.

And that's always what's driven me. That's where I want to make the most difference because I've worked with threatened endangered species for most of my career. I used to not seeing what I study. A Lynx is a very snow-adapted cat, and we actually don't know how many they are. We pick up scat or hair, and then from the scatter here, you get genetic information and you can identify a species or an individual.

Using camera traps, you don't always get the perfect picture, and it's often hard to tell if that's the Lynx or a bobcat. So we try and use track surveys to cover more of the areas that the animals actually inhabit. Even experts misidentify tracks. When tracks melt out, they're hard to identify. We make mistakes as humans.

I have definitely always had an affinity for river systems and really anything aquatic. So when I learned about tools like environmental DNA, it was mind-blowing that I can then just go out, collect a water sample, and tell you what species were upstream. Environmental DNA, in its truest form, is DNA that is shed from a species into the environment.

So that DNA could be cells from skin, from hair, from feces, from urine—anything that is then shed from that animal into the environment. Here at the genomic center, we've analyzed over 10,000 samples from 480 different species, and I really work to make that tool available for anyone across the world.

So this all came from a collaborative meeting with geneticists, with carnivore researchers, with the EDA program. We were all kind of talking about plans for winter sampling: how the Lynx crew is going to be doing their fieldwork. Then, kind of as a group, we came to this moment of like, "Huh, well, snow tracks are basically just water samples. If we melt them out, there should be no reason that that shouldn't work, just as we treat a normal street sample."

It's been through a lot of conversations and working with Tommy, and then one day we just decided, "Let's see what happens when we scoop snow. Let's test this." It was one of those moments where you come back into the lab, you plug in the results, you're waiting for it to load, and all of a sudden they pop up on the screen.

And it's one of those Eureka moments: we can detect DNA from snow tracks. Like that alone in itself is crazy. It's really exciting to see all of the success that EDA has had with detecting rare species in streams and to bring that onto land. There's no question; you know we find the Lynx, and it is Lynx, and we don't have to focus our efforts on that. We can instead focus on these broader conservation questions.

I think that we're not going to be able to do conservation without collaboration. We're providing people with good science-based information and letting them make more informed decisions for conservation. And I think there's nothing greater than that.

So I have never seen it; only who knows if I ever will. But with eDNA, like I don't have to see it to know it's there, and that is truly remarkable about this technology. By detecting a single cell of DNA on an entire landscape, we can effectively influence how over 5 million acres of land are managed.