Back

City life: airborne DNA metagenomic biodiversity monitoring reveals dynamic changes across time and space

Peel, N.; Cuber, P.; Heavens, D.; Giolai, M.; Martin, S.; Alston, M.; Chooneea, D.; Aanstad, P.; Misra, R.; Leggett, R. M.; Clark, M. D.

2026-09-03 ecology
10.64898/2026.08.31.747859 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Airborne environmental DNA can capture biodiversity across the tree of life, but low sample biomass makes rapid, untargeted detection technically challenging. We combined 45-min air collection, nanopore sequencing and real-time taxonomic analysis in a shotgun metagenomic workflow capable of producing results within 3 hours. Across 77 samples from 13 London sites, including a year of weekly sampling at the Natural History Museum Wildlife Garden, we detected 1,916 species spanning bacteria, fungi, plants and animals. Communities varied spatially and seasonally, shifting from plant dominance in spring to ascomycete dominance in summer and basidiomycete dominance in late autumn and winter. Plant read abundance increased with upwind vegetation, linking airborne signals to surrounding habitat. Detection of catalogued garden plants depended on reference availability, dispersal biology, plant size and proximity to the collector. Together, these findings establish airborne shotgun metagenomics as a platform for rapid, repeated and scalable biodiversity assessment across space and time.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Cell
○ 431 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
21.5%
Similar papers in this journal
2
Science
● 477 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
9.5%
Similar papers in this journal
3
Nature Communications
○ 5641 papers in training set
Top 25%
6.6%
Similar papers in this journal
4
Nature
○ 645 papers in training set
Top 3%
6.1%
Similar papers in this journal
5
ISME Communications
◐ 120 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
4.0%
Similar papers in this journal
6
Scientific Reports
○ 3612 papers in training set
Top 29%
3.4%
50% of probability mass above
7
PLOS ONE
● 5266 papers in training set
Top 37%
3.2%
8
Molecular Ecology Resources
○ 171 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
3.1%
9
Communications Earth & Environment
○ 14 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
2.7%
10
Nature Ecology & Evolution
131 papers in training set
Top 0.9%
2.4%
11
Nature Microbiology
○ 155 papers in training set
Top 1%
2.3%
12
Journal of Applied Ecology
○ 39 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
2.1%
13
iScience
○ 1154 papers in training set
Top 14%
2.1%
14
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
● 72 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
1.9%
15
eLife
● 5828 papers in training set
Top 48%
1.9%
16
Microbiome
○ 154 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.7%
17
Communications Biology
○ 993 papers in training set
Top 15%
1.7%
18
The ISME Journal
◐ 228 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.5%
19
Molecular Ecology
○ 336 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.4%
20
Nature Biotechnology
○ 172 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.4%
21
Current Biology
○ 665 papers in training set
Top 8%
1.1%
22
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
○ 176 papers in training set
Top 1%
1.1%
23
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
● 2444 papers in training set
Top 38%
1.0%
24
Science Advances
● 1243 papers in training set
Top 28%
1.0%
25
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
○ 69 papers in training set
Top 3%
0.8%
26
GigaScience
◐ 212 papers in training set
Top 4%
0.8%
27
mSystems
● 394 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.8%
28
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
● 393 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.8%
29
Ecology Letters
○ 135 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.6%
30
New Phytologist
○ 346 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.6%

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.