In this episode of FieldSound, we hear from Ryan Kelly, professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs. Trained as both an ecologist and a lawyer, Kelly brings a unique perspective to his research at the boundaries of marine science and real-world environmental law and policy. He works closely with federal agencies and currently serves on a national task force that aims to move science into practice at a federal level.
A major focus of Kelly’s research involves environmental DNA, or eDNA, which is genetic material shed by organisms that is released into the environment. It can be collected from a variety of environmental samples, such as soil or seawater, with the idea that as organisms interact in the environment, their DNA will accumulate in their surroundings. Kelly explains that now we can take a cup of seawater, for example, sequence the DNA out of it, and see what lives nearby — we can see hundreds of thousands of species, all at once.
Now, the challenge is to make sense of all this data. Kelly also is the director of the eDNA Collaborative, which aims to move the use of eDNA out of the lab and into practice in real-world environmental management and conservation.
Some ways it’s already being used: In Puget Sound, using eDNA to look at the impacts of urbanization on the nearshore environment; measuring the effects of culvert restoration for salmon in Washington state; and surveying the edges of the invasion of European green crab in Washington.
The Collaborative has awarded 130 “microgrants” to people in 40 different countries in its goal to make this technology and knowledge more accessible.
Kelly also discusses his recent co-authored work, “Between the Tides,” which offers readers a comprehensive guide to the beaches and tidepools of Washington, Oregon and California, enriching our understanding of coastal marine ecology.
Full episode transcript
Sarah Smith
From the University of Washington College of the Environment. This is FieldSound.
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Sarah Smith
A scientist endeavors to make sense of the natural world using scientific methods
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Sarah Smith
through observation and conducting experiments.
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Sarah Smith
Scientists systematically gather information in order to test their research and make hypotheses. To gain understanding and knowledge.
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Sarah Smith
But how do scientists generate information that’s useful? And how do they use the information that’s been generated? Ryan Kelly is a professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington College of the Environment. Trained as both an ecologist and a lawyer, Kelly brings a unique perspective to his research at the boundaries of marine science
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Sarah Smith
and real world environmental law and policy.
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Ryan Kelly
as happens, I think to a lot of scientists, you go through the process of becoming, you know, getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc and you get to some point where you’re like, okay, now what’s next? Like, how do I do? How do I change the world in some way? And, you know, even in a very minor way.
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Ryan Kelly
But how do I how do I plug in? Where do I plug in? And for me, I sort of hit a wall during my postdoc or after my postdoc, which is, you know, after a Ph.D. where I just didn’t know what the next step was. And I’d always been curious about law. And that’s so I jumped into law school, which felt like a, you know, brazen leap into the unknown.
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Ryan Kelly
But it it worked. It worked great. And it turned out that it was really a lot of the same skills that scientists have, lawyers have. They just use different vocabulary for critical thinking. So then in the years since then, I’ve been trying to I’ve been trying to to have those worlds come together. And I so I try to exist at that intersection of science and policy where I’m doing a really I’m doing real science.
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Speaker 2
But then I’m also quite interested in how it gets used in the real world. And I’d like to help that habit. So I work closely with federal agencies and sort of I’m on a national task force at the moment to move. I moved the science into practice at a federal level.
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Speaker 1
Part of Kelly’s research is focused on environmental DNA,
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Speaker 1
also known as E! DNA.
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Speaker 1
E DNA is genetic material shed by organisms that’s released into the environment
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Speaker 1
Edna can be collected from a variety of environmental samples, such as soil or seawater,
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Speaker 1
with the idea that as organisms interact with the environment,
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Speaker 1
Their DNA will accumulate in their surroundings.
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Speaker 2
Eden is short for environmental DNA, and this is the just a very basic level. We are all shedding DNA out into the world at all times. And in the pandemic, this became really, really obvious where we were. You know, it became apparent for the first time to many of us that were sharing viruses, like all the time by by breathing, like simply by being in the same space.
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Speaker 2
Well, it’s not just viruses. It’s cells of all kinds like we are. You are inhaling and exhaling the world that you live in all the time. And every one of those cells has the has DNA within it that is diagnostic for the species that it’s coming from.
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Speaker 2
So that’s true in air, That’s true in soil. It’s true in water.
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Speaker 2
And
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Speaker 2
many, many species are living in these environments at any given time, and all of those species are shedding their DNA out into that environment.
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Speaker 2
we’ve learned to go like we can take a liter of seawater, we can take a cup of seawater, sequence the DNA out of it and tell you it lives nearby.
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Speaker 2
We can see hundreds or thousands of species all at once. And it’s not just true of seawater. It’s true of like the drops of water coming, like rainwater, for example, or drops of water coming from the trees. You can strap an air filter to a tree and just filter air. And you can see the the DNA from the surrounding trees in the forest and the birds that live in those trees.
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Speaker 2
So it’s this really incredible source of information. We are swimming in information about the environment and the living parts of our ecosystems. And now the question is what do we want to do with that information? How do we make the best use of it?
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Speaker 1
Tools like Edna are powerful and are changing how scientists do science.
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Speaker 2
you’ve got to write code, right?
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Speaker 2
You’ve got to and this is true of biologists in general that a lot of biologists, they go into the work because their interested in the species that they find particularly appealing or a system they find particularly appealing. And so you go into biology to count snails on Iraq and you end up very quickly writing computer code because you can’t it’s a very different job, right?
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Speaker 2
You become part computer scientist and part statistician because the amount of data coming at you isn’t just counting the snails on a rock. It doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet any longer, right? It’s gigabytes where the data and you have to write code to handle that.
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Speaker 2
historically we sequenced DNA from like one species at a time by like slicing out a piece of tissue and digesting that tissue.
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Speaker 2
And we know, like the DNA that’s in one thing and it had it has one sequence that comes out of it. And we it’s a it’s a single species, one strand at a time sort of method. Then with there is actually a new, newer DNA sequencing technology that arose maybe 15 years ago now, and that became 20 years ago, that became
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Speaker 2
very tractable and and much cheaper to sequence many, many species all at once.
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Speaker 2
And you would get in parallel the sequences of all of those species all at once. So it was really the equivalent of
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Speaker 2
rather than looking at, you know, life in black and white, all of a sudden life is in color. Like instead of looking at one species at a time, all of a sudden you could look at the sequences of a thousand species at once and make sense of that information.
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Speaker 2
And then how do you get these these tools to talk to each other? It’s like we have the sequencing technology, but where do you point it
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Speaker 2
how do you frame a research question or a topic of interest that is then makes the best use of this new technology?
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Speaker 2
So that has led me into a world of much more quantitative analysis where
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Speaker 2
there is a combination of, of a newer sequencing technology that came online, the adaptability of the technology to environmental questions of interest and policy and management questions of interest.
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Speaker 2
And then, you know, developing a skill set in writing code and quantitative analysis of that. And it all sort of comes together so that it becomes possible to make sense of the data that you’re getting out of the world, because it is this firehose of information that’s coming out of
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Speaker 2
environmental DNA signals.
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Speaker 2
we started out about 12 years ago now in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, because we because that was a place where it’s a controlled environment. It was a really big tank. I think it’s 4000 liters and was called the Open Bay exhibit, I think. And in that case, we could you could see the fish that were in there.
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Speaker 2
And so it was like a test case to be like, can we does this really work? Can we really see the fish from the DNA in the water? And we found that not only could we see most of the fish that were there, we saw a bunch of fish that weren’t there, and we were confused by that until we realized it was the food that they were feeding the fish.
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Speaker 2
So we learned something there about the sensitivity of the technique. We were like, Whoa, We knew we had a microscope, but we have a really sensitive microscope because we’re picking up the DNA from the fish food that they’re feeding the fish. We can see that tells you that we’re looking at like little, little, little fractions of of the DNA that’s present in the environment.
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Speaker 2
So incredibly sensitive technique,
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Speaker 1
in science. Questions often lead to more questions.
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Speaker 2
I think you have to try and develop an intuition for what leads are worth tracking down and which you you let fall by the wayside and a degree of.
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Speaker 2
But that’s also what makes it fun, right? It’s an adventure. I come to work every day and I literally don’t know what’s going to happen. And that’s that’s great. That keeps an interesting.
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Speaker 1
So how is Edna being utilized to help policymakers better understand environmental impact and what other questions might benefit from the use of Edna?
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Speaker 2
a lot of people, I think because of this underlying you can see fish in your net, you can’t see the DNA and so therefore it feels untrustworthy until you get enough experience with it.
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Speaker 2
And then you kind of understand what’s going on. So we’ve applied it in lots of different ways. I mean, in Puget Sound, we’ve looked at the effects of urbanization along the shore and how that’s changed the nearshore ecosystems as reflected in DNA. We have done salmon culverts
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Speaker 2
replacing salmon covers. That was just this past year
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Speaker 2
there’s a court order in western Washington to replace all these culverts under roads, and it’s billions and billions of dollars.
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Speaker 2
And is that actually working?
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Speaker 2
DNA is scalable in a way that we thought, if we can show that we can, you know, measure the effects of a culvert restoration, that would be a useful tool for the for the state that has to do this over and over again.
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Speaker 2
DNA is good for surveying the edges of, you know, an invasion front and knowing where things are and maybe forecasting where they’ll be. We did that with green crab in the Puget Sound as the larvae of the green crab are sort of invading, we could see see where they are.
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Speaker 2
And you see them before you see the the adult although endangered species, things that are they’re rare is they’re by definition hard to find, hard to count and they might be able to hide, but the DNA can’t. And so it really useful for that.
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Speaker 2
But big picture what I love to see is make use of this sequencing thousands of species at once for environmental impact reporting because we have a federal statute, NEPA, that requires environmental impact reporting.
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Speaker 2
I think that’s 11 states that have their own statutes that require the same thing for any major development project. What if DNA were the scalable, standardized way of measuring environmental impact? No, we’ve never had that in the, you know, 50 plus years of having to do environmental impact assessment. We still are very good at it. And this is a way of actually measuring environmental impact
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Speaker 1
Kelly is also part of the Edna Collaborative,
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Speaker 1
working to develop Edna methods and applications,
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Speaker 1
accelerate research and make science more accessible globally.
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Speaker 2
so the You Eden a collaborative is our center I guess you could call it. It’s a group here at UW, it’s funded by the Packard Foundation and the goal of the 80 day Collaborative is to move DNA out of the lab and into practice worldwide. And we’ve done that in a bunch of different ways.
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Speaker 2
But one of the most important ones is by trying to lower barriers to entry for people, researchers around the world, particularly in the global South. So DNA, you know, DNA sequencing is is really, really cheap on a per sample basis. But you still need like $100,000 sequencer and you need a lab to run it and you need electricity to plug it into.
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Speaker 2
You need the reagents that are that are expensive and need refrigeration. All kinds of reasons why what we can do in Seattle is really, really hard to do in, you know, in the field in Indonesia, for example, or in the Ivory Coast, where we have sort of friends and collaborators working, we’d love to be able to make this same set of of tools and techniques available to everybody at a low cost.
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Speaker 2
And so that’s one of the goals of the idea Collaborative is to try and do that in the interim, how we’re how we’re trying to help that situation is
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Speaker 2
like so because these are collaborators, it’s fine to share equipment with collaborators where that’s what we’re doing, or by paying for collaborators around the world to ten trainings, things like this that.
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Speaker 2
So anything we can do to try and lower those barriers to entry makes it more sort of accessible technology
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Speaker 2
and these right now it’s people that are in graduate school that ten years from now are going to be in decision making positions in all these different countries.
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Speaker 2
so far as 130, we call these micro-grids 830 micro grants to people in 40 different countries.
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Speaker 2
And that’s how we’re trying to just make a small dent in in these sort of historical inequities and try and move the field forward.
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Speaker 1
In addition to Edna
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Speaker 1
and teaching at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, Kelly is also a published author.
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Speaker 1
He recently coauthored Between the Tides, a duo of guidebooks designed to give readers interested in coastal marine ecology
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Speaker 1
a comprehensive understanding of what tide pools in Washington, Oregon and California have to offer.
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Speaker 2
you know, I mentioned, I think one of the joys of my job and of a university job in general is the idea that you can go down these roads that you find interesting and try and see where they lead and hopefully develop a product out of that. And
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Speaker 2
It’s a field guide to the ecology of the West Coast. And the idea was, was that you would be able to keep this in your car as you’re on a road trip and, you know, you it explains not just what’s there, why you’ll see this species here and there’s other species down here, but but why? And I thought I was really interested in explaining process and that’s what ecologists are really interested in, not just pattern but process.
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Speaker 2
And so John Mayer from
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Speaker 2
the College of the Environment and I were talking one afternoon in my backyard years ago now where I said, you know, I had this book proposal. I’ve never really done anything with it. And John’s like, Well, we should, you know, hey, would you send it to me? And so he really gave the project a nudge that it needed to happen.
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Speaker 2
And then we talked Terry Clinger into joining us, and Terry’s on the faculty with me and asked me. And so we were able to to piece this book together. And it’s just been a joy to like go into the, you know, pull books off the shelf and say, well, here’s a story I think I know. Is that is that really I’m really happen and how is there evidence behind that and to put together you know a whole bunch of thoughts about ecology and evolution and natural history and, you know, geology getting it all on paper and then seeing it in three dimensions is really great.
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Speaker 2
what it feels like to come to work every day and work on a technology that is truly in like a really fundamentally different way of seeing the world that is that is new, that feels like working at the it’s like I I’ve never been ever been a coal miner as might not surprise you but like what I imagine a miner of any kind does is serve you’re at like a
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Speaker 2
rock face wall and you don’t know where the vein is going to go. And you’re like chipping away at it. But you think that you that you’re going somewhere and it’s it’s not totally clear where it’s going to lead, but, you know, you’re sort of shaping the future in some in some small way. And this feels like we’re mining this vein of information and technology and that we are seeing the future take shape.
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Speaker 2
And it was ten years seemed crazy that we could take bottles of water from along the West Coast and map out fish over hundreds of miles. That seemed like witchcraft, right? And it is not. Which is now not only possible, but it is done. We’ve done it. And that’s amazing. And that’s a feeling that most people don’t get at their jobs.
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Speaker 2
So that’s just what I love.
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Speaker 1
A big thank you to our guest, Ryan Kelly.
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Speaker 1
You can learn more about Kelly’s work over on our website at environment UW dot edu.
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Speaker 1
From all of us at Field Sound. Thanks for listening. We’ll
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Speaker 1
We’ll see you next time.
