D3463: Monitoring Odonata biodiversity in urban environments

Insect populations worldwide are, generally, declining, and little information is known about this decline, nor what to do about it. Environmental DNA (e-DNA) is a useful tool for determining the presence of insects in aquatic areas, as it is an non-invasive technique. In the wake of insect decline, monitoring populations of aquatic insects allows the effects of environmental occurrences, such as urbanization,  to be assessed. Odonata represents a keystone order in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, acting as an important biocontrol and indicator to assess the health of the entire ecosystem. The purposes of this experiment include testing various methods for eDNA quantification for dragonflies and damselflies and testing a potential method for keeping track of their population within urban environments by contributing our observations to the iNaturalist database. We aimed to examine the effect of urbanization on two Odonate populations, one in Boise and one in Manhattan. A metabarcoding pipeline was used on both kick samples from Boise, Idaho and water samples of filtered eDNA collected from Turtle Pond and the lake in Central Park. We evaluated our findings in the context of Odonata (dragonfly and damselfly) local biodiversity. This study is ongoing; however, preliminary results suggest that urbanization has a negative effect on Odonate species richness in Boise, Idaho.