California eDNA Atlas

We're building a federated, GIS-indexed map of the organisms in California's soil, water, and air — from the Oregon border to the Salton Sea. The atlas opens with our summer 2026 alpha cohort and grows as new schools and partners come online.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is the genetic material organisms shed into their surroundings — sequencing it from a soil, water, or air sample reveals which species are present without ever having to see or capture them.

Explore the preview Get notified at launch

California spans nine Jepson ecoregions — the Great Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, Northwestern California, Cascade Range, Central Western California, Southwestern California, East of Sierra Nevada, Mojave Desert, and Sonoran Desert. Each has distinct soil microbiomes, aquatic communities, and airborne biodiversity. The atlas will grow to cover them as cohorts come online.

Sampling Regions

Our alpha cohort starts in six sampling regions, drawn from California's nine Jepson ecoregions — the atlas expands to all nine as new cohorts come online.

Central Valley

California's 18,000-square-mile agricultural heartland — schoolyards and farms from Sacramento to Bakersfield, rich ground for sampling fungal and bacterial diversity.

Coast

From Monterey Bay to the Channel Islands — kelp forests, estuaries, and the open ocean, where water-borne eDNA reveals marine life that is otherwise hard to see.

Sierra Nevada

Montane and alpine ecosystems from 4,000 to 14,000 feet. Freshwater eDNA in snowmelt-fed streams reveals what lives above the treeline.

Northwestern California

Redwood forests and the Klamath River watershed — some of the most biodiverse temperate forest on Earth.

Central Western California

San Francisco Bay Area to Big Sur. Urban-wildland interface sampling where 8 million people meet oak woodland and chaparral.

Southwestern California

San Diego to the Salton Sea. A desert-to-coast gradient spanning 100 miles and three distinct biomes.

From Sample to Atlas

Field teams collect GPS-tagged soil or water samples, sequence on Oxford Nanopore MinION devices, and upload through our bioinformatics pipeline. Dorado converts raw electrical signals to nucleotide reads. Kraken2 maps those reads against the NCBI taxonomy database. Results land on the atlas as interactive GeoJSON layers rendered in MapLibre GL JS.

Every sample carries MIxS-compliant metadata — collection date, GPS coordinates, environmental package, and sequencing chemistry. FAIR principles are enforced at ingestion, not after the fact.

1

Field Collection

GPS-tagged soil, water, or air sample
2

MinION Sequencing

Flongle flow cell, real-time basecalling
3

Dorado Basecalling

Raw signal converted to nucleotide reads
4

Kraken2 Classification

Reads mapped to NCBI taxonomy
5

Atlas Upload

GeoJSON metadata indexed in MapLibre