Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI)

New Capabilities

Holds the archive that anchored the long-run biodiversity study

For most of conservation history, counting wildlife meant walking into a forest with binoculars, traps, or camera arrays. A new method does the work without ever seeing the animal: filter the air, sequence the DNA fragments floating in it, and read off which species were nearby. By April 2026, the technique has detected 120 vertebrate species in a Zambian savanna in four days, recovered three decades of biodiversity change from a Swedish Cold War nuclear-monitoring archive, and — in a June 2025 first — used an existing national air-quality monitoring network to identify over 1,100 taxa across vertebrates, invertebrates, fungi, and plants in a single country-wide survey.

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