CALeDNA

The California Environmental DNA Program

Sharing eDNA wisdom from California with the world

Headquartered at UC Santa Cruz, est. 2017

Collect, Analyze, and Share

CALeDNA is here to help everyone to collect soil, sediment, or water samples, store them safely for long term use, process the samples in the lab with metabarcoding, qPCR, dPCR, or metagenomics, analyze the data, and share the results! In a single sample we find biodiversity of hundreds to thousands of microbes, fungi, plants and animals.

Partner up with us

Are you starting to plan an eDNA study? Get in touch with the CALeDNA team if you’d like help planning your study. We love sharing as much as we can about what we’ve learned from 9 years of eDNA supporting over 100 projects! From ‘how many samples should I take’ to ‘what’s the latest technology I can leverage' to ‘what statistics or machine learning can I use to answer my question’, we can use our dense California data of over 5000 samples to help you make data-informed choices.

- Sites

- Organisms identified

- Registered users

Open Biodiversity Data for Everyone

We openly share our methods and respnsibly share results that define California’s biodiversity baseline. Check out the Explore Data and Get Involved tab in the top banner. You don’t need to sign up to see results! As of 2024 we are sharing projects on eDNA Explorer, so please check out our work there! For example, LA River eDNA from 2021-2022

We help you run your study, partnering with eDNA Explorer to do powerful analysis and data curation. Whether you’re looking for a lab to process your samples, or you’re interested in a research collaboration, we got you!