Biodiversity credits are moving quickly from concept notes to implementation—and East African savannas are where some of the hardest questions are being tested.

The promise is simple: markets can channel finance toward measurable, verifiable biodiversity outcomes at landscape scales. But the challenge is just as clear: unlike with carbon credits, biodiversity "units" can be counted in so many ways.

Since a credit is only as credible as the monitoring behind it, a theme that keeps emerging from technical and policy discussions involves trying to figure out whether DNA-powered approaches can help. In principle, any DNA we detect in the environment can help make biodiversity surveys more reliable and harder to game. But all DNA-based approaches rely on unseen infrastructure that most people never consider: reference DNA libraries that must be constructed based on verifiably identified specimens. When biodiversity targets are poorly covered by these libraries, even the most sophisticated survey methods can collapse into reports that are frustratingly full of "unknowns."

That message came through repeatedly at recent meetings in Nairobi, Kenya. Last week, Dr. Mary Burak (Senior Postdoc, Genomic Opportunities Lab) attended both the Business for Conservation Conference and the Global Conservation Technology & Drone Forum. A recurring question she encountered in conversations with practitioners, business leaders, and researchers went like this: what would it take to use DNA as "creditable" in savanna biodiversity programs—and who is going to build the databases we need to get there?

Because translating complex biodiversity data into actionable information is one of our team's core strengths, we wanted to share this post as a practical summary of the field. We will outline how biodiversity credits work, how programs affecting East African savannas are typically structured, and when DNA can add real value. You will discover that DNA reference libraries are currently an undervalued and high-leverage investment that savvy leaders are making—they recognize that you can't make DNA creditable without it.

​The key question we reveal for anyone who wants to participate in this market: what is the return on investment you can expect from building the reference libraries that underpin success—and how long will it take for the investment to increase the value of your monitoring services or offset programs?

Mary Burak led a workshop together with Save the Elephants and the National Museums of Kenya. The meeting convened at the Save the Elephants headquarters at Samburu, and the team spent a few days learning to collect voucher plant specimens for DNA barcoding. In a very short period of time, they added an important chunk of regional plant diversity to the collections available for barcoding.

Congratulations to Bianca Brown, microbiome scientist extraordinaire, on her publication appearing today in Ecosphere! Spatiotemporal variation in the gut microbiomes of co-occurring wild rodent species is freely available via open access. It is a rare example of the type of insightful work that can develop through collaborations involving field, lab, and big-data analytical approaches to really understand what's going on with wildlife. It is part of our long-term collaboration with the UHURU project at Mpala Research Centre in Kenya.

The paper led by Brian Gill on individual-level tracking of elephant diets -- Foraging History of Individual Elephants Using DNA Metabarcoding -- was just published by Royal Society Open Science. We are very proud of this paper, which revisits a set of classic studies on seasonal diet switching by elephants using stable isotopes in hair that were led by coauthors Thure Cerling and George Wittemeyer. The work was made possible with support in the field from Save the Elephants and with the botanical expertise of coauthor Paul Musili from the National Museums of Kenya.

The paper was accompanied by a great summary by Corrie Pikul and featured on the Brown University homepage: Similar to Humans, Elephants Vary What they Eat for Dinner. 

The paper also attracted attention in the media, including interviews on BBC Television and Times Radio. Some nice coverage of the study was also provided by BBC (with hilarious photos), Newsweek, ZME Science, and The Times. 

Bianca Brown published a paper entitled Host phylogeny and functional traits differentiate gut microbiomes in a diverse natural community of small mammals in Molecular Ecology. This paper was the result of a major collaborative effort that benefited from Bianca's insight, creativity, and leadership. This post summarizes the paper that emerged from the Kartzinel Lab's long-term research on food webs in African savannas.

Several members of the lab are just back from an extremely productive field trip. Highlights include a DNA barcoding workshop at the National Museums of Kenya (led by Tyler Kartzinel and of Brown University Brian Gill, and Director Paul Musili from the East African Herbarium), many pre-dawn captures of small mammals (led by Bianca Brown and collaborators from the Goheen lab), and many trees and and megaherbivores counted (led by Brian Gill and Peter Lokeny). Now the team is breaking in the new lab -- copious amounts of data to report soon! Photos of the highlights are below.