Short Answer: No internationally agreed standard exists for airborne eDNA monitoring. The field is in an active standardisation phase, with the UK National Physical Laboratory/LGC collaboration, an Australian workshop convened by over 100 researchers, and a growing body of methods comparison studies all working toward agreed protocols. The key gaps are harmonised sampling procedures, validated quality controls, and a framework for interpreting results that regulators can rely on.
1. Where the standardisation question stands
When a monitoring method is used to demonstrate regulatory compliance (to show that a protected species is or is not present at a site, that a habitat has recovered to a given condition, or that an invasive species has been successfully eradicated), the data it generates must be scientifically defensible and legally admissible. This requires that the method has been validated against independent standards, that its uncertainty has been quantified, and that its protocols are documented precisely enough that another laboratory could reproduce the same result from the same sample. It is worth noting, however, that this bar is not always uniformly applied to methods currently accepted in practice. A trained ecologist's visual observation of a protected species (which may rely on individual expertise, fleeting field conditions, and a single witness) is accepted in regulatory and legal contexts with no requirement for inter-laboratory reproducibility. The relevant question for airborne eDNA is not whether it meets an absolute standard of reproducibility that no other method meets, but whether its evidence quality, with appropriate documentation and quality controls, is sufficient for the specific decision being made.
Airborne eDNA does not yet meet this bar. This is not a criticism of the science (the method has developed rapidly and has a strong empirical foundation) but a straightforward statement of where the field sits in its development. Tulloch et al. (2025), synthesising the outputs of a June 2024 workshop convening over 100 airborne eDNA researchers and biodiversity management stakeholders, identified method harmonisation as one of the field's most urgent priorities, noting that variation in sampling devices, filter materials, collection durations, extraction protocols, sequencing platforms, and bioinformatic pipelines makes cross-study comparison challenging.
Johnson & Barnes (2024), reviewing macrobial airborne eDNA analysis across the published literature, reached the same conclusion from a different direction: the diversity of methodological choices in the existing literature, with no method emerging as a clear consensus standard, limits the ability to synthesise results or build towards regulatory adoption.
Until internationally agreed standards are established, airborne eDNA data can contribute meaningfully to decision-making but should not be the sole evidentiary basis for regulatory decisions. That said, this situation is not unique to airborne eDNA: many monitoring methods routinely used in environmental impact assessments (including transect surveys, acoustic monitoring, and traditional eDNA for several taxon groups) do not have full internationally agreed standards either. Regulators generally accept a method if it is scientifically justified, the methodology is transparently documented, and the results are repeatable and interpretable. The path to regulatory acceptance for airborne eDNA is therefore not the creation of something unprecedented, but the development of the same level of documented practice and peer validation that other accepted methods already have.
2. What standardisation means in practice
Standardisation of an environmental monitoring method requires agreement across several distinct dimensions, which are worth separating because they involve different scientific and institutional challenges.
Sampling protocols specify how air is collected: which sampler type, what flow rate, what filter material or method, what pore size, what sampling duration, and what height and environmental conditions. Studies to date have used a wide range of configurations, and there is not yet consensus on optimal choices even for the most-studied applications (vertebrate community monitoring). Jager et al. (2025) showed that passive and active sampling strategies produce different results suggesting that the choice of sampling mode is not merely logistical but affects the biological interpretation of results.
Laboratory protocols specify how DNA is extracted from the filter, how it is amplified (and with which primers), how libraries are prepared, and which sequencing platform is used. Each step introduces variation. Primer choice determines which taxa can be detected. Extraction efficiency varies with filter material and protocol. Sequencing platform and depth determine which low-abundance taxa appear in the data.
Bioinformatic pipelines translate sequencing data into species lists. Different pipelines apply different quality thresholds, use different reference databases, and handle ambiguous assignments differently. The same raw sequence data can yield substantially different species lists depending on the pipeline used. Reference database completeness is a specific constraint: Sullivan et al. (2025) found that 76% of shotgun reads were unclassifiable, reflecting both genuine uncharacterised taxa and genomic data gaps for known species.
Statistical interpretation frameworks are needed to translate a list of DNA detections into a statement about species presence, abundance or distribution. The relationship between eDNA signal intensity and abundance is not straightforward for airborne samples, and the probability of false positives from transported DNA must be accounted for in any regulatory use.
3. Active standardisation initiatives
Several coordinated efforts are now under way, none of which has yet produced a published international standard but all of which are advancing the field.
The UK NPL/LGC collaboration. The UK National Physical Laboratory and the National Measurement Laboratory at LGC (Laboratory of the Government Chemist) launched a collaboration in 2024–25 specifically focused on developing measurement standards for airborne eDNA biodiversity monitoring, with biodiversity credits and regulatory compliance as explicit use cases. The project aims to develop reference materials, validated extraction and sequencing protocols, and an inter-laboratory comparison framework. This is the most explicitly regulatory-focused standardisation effort currently active (NPL/LGC 2025; Tulloch et al. 2025).
The Southern eDNA Society workshop outcomes. The June 2024 Canberra workshop produced a consensus statement, published as Tulloch et al. (2025), identifying specific methodological priorities. These include: (1) harmonising sampler design and deployment parameters; (2) establishing agreed quality thresholds for filtering eDNA reads; (3) developing standardised approaches to contamination monitoring; and (4) building common bioinformatic pipelines that allow results to be compared across studies and programmes.
The EU Nature Restoration Law context. The EU Nature Restoration Law, adopted in 2024, creates binding obligations for member states to restore degraded ecosystems and monitor progress. Airborne eDNA is a plausible monitoring tool for this purpose, given the regulation's requirement for standardised, repeated monitoring of biodiversity recovery across large land and sea areas: precisely the application where airborne eDNA's landscape-scale footprint and taxonomic breadth are most relevant. The European Environment Agency has noted the method’s potential, but adoption will require standardised protocols that can be specified in monitoring guidance documents. This regulatory driver is likely to accelerate standardisation work in European research institutions over the next several years.
ISO eDNA work. ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) has an active working group on eDNA methods under Technical Committee 147 (Water quality), focused primarily on aquatic applications, where a suite of standards spanning sampling, filter extraction, targeted amplification and metabarcoding is now at various stages of development. Several of these address substrate-agnostic steps in the molecular workflow and could inform airborne protocols directly rather than requiring entirely new methods. Expansion of formal ISO work to airborne methods is anticipated as the field matures, but no published ISO standard for airborne eDNA monitoring currently exists.
4. What needs to be resolved before regulatory adoption
For airborne eDNA data to underpin regulatory decisions, rather than simply inform them, several specific gaps must be addressed.
- Method validation studiesare needed that compare airborne eDNA results against independent, validated observations of the same species communities at the same sites. Warmer et al. (2025) made progress on this in the Dutch agroforestry context, comparing airborne eDNA against observer surveys, acoustic monitoring, and camera traps, and finding complementary rather than redundant information.
- False positive ratesmust be better understood. DNA can travel tens of kilometres from its source and persist on filters for extended periods; a detection cannot automatically be equated with local presence. For regulatory use, a decision framework is needed that defines when a detection is sufficient to trigger a management response and when it requires confirmation by other methods.
- Reference database coveragemust be improved for policy-relevant taxa. For common European and North American species, database coverage is generally adequate. For invertebrates, rare plants, and taxa in the Global South, gaps remain significant.
- Inter-laboratory reproducibilitymust be demonstrated. A method is scientifically robust only if different laboratories processing the same sample reach the same conclusion. For airborne eDNA, inter-laboratory comparison studies have not yet been published, though the NPL/LGC project is expected to produce this.
- Chain of custody and evidence documentationstandards are needed for regulatory and, potentially, legal applications. A sample that cannot be tracked from collection through to analysis with documented handling records cannot be used in enforcement proceedings.
5. The honest assessment: where this leaves practitioners today
For conservation managers and policy advisors commissioning monitoring in 2026, airborne eDNA can make a genuine contribution, but with explicit caveats about its current regulatory status.
The method is scientifically credible for detecting the presence of many taxa at a landscape scale, for identifying priority species across large areas efficiently, and for tracking broad trends in biodiversity when the same protocol is used consistently over time at the same sites. These applications do not require full regulatory standardisation.
What airborne eDNA cannot yet do, and should not be represented as capable of doing, is provide legally defensible evidence of species presence or absence that would meet the evidentiary standards required for protected site assessments, development consent conditions, or biodiversity offsetting baseline determination. For these applications, it must currently be used as a complementary tool alongside validated conventional methods, with the expectation that its role will expand as standardisation progresses.
The UK NPL/LGC project and the Southern eDNA Society workshop represent a field that is taking standardisation seriously. The honest forecast is that recognised standard methods for at least some airborne eDNA applications, and likely for the most straightforward use cases such as landscape-level biodiversity trend monitoring, will exist within five years, but they do not exist yet, and programmes designed today should be built with that trajectory in mind.
6. Learning from water: the more mature aquatic eDNA standards
Aquatic eDNA is several years ahead of airborne eDNA on formal standardisation, and its trajectory is the most useful guide to where airborne methods are heading. Under ISO Technical Committee 147 (Water quality), a dedicated working group is developing a suite of environmental-DNA standards that span the full workflow from sampling to community analysis, at stages ranging from near-publication to early proposals. Airborne eDNA sits at an earlier point on the same path, but it does not need to start from scratch: several of these standards address steps that are largely independent of whether the DNA came from water or air, while others are specific to aquatic sampling and taxa.
The components most readily transferable to airborne workflows are those covering the molecular and quality-assurance core rather than the water-specific sampling steps:
- ISO/FDIS 17805: Sampling, capture and preservation of environmental DNA from water. Now at Final Draft stage (close to publication); its capture-and-preservation principles are partly substrate-independent.
- ISO/PWI 25605: General principles for quality assurance of molecular-biological examination for environmental DNA. A quality-assurance framework written to be substrate-agnostic.
- ISO 26488: Extraction of environmental DNA (eDNA) from filters. Directly relevant, because airborne eDNA is also captured on filters.
- ISO 26532: Specifications for targeted amplification of environmental DNA/RNA samples through PCR. Amplification specifications are largely independent of the collection medium.
The lesson for airborne eDNA is twofold. First, the trajectory is encouraging: a closely related environmental-DNA field has moved from research method toward formal international standardisation within roughly a decade, and that is the route airborne methods now need to travel. Second, standardisation need not be built entirely anew. The substrate-agnostic elements above (general QA principles, filter extraction, targeted amplification, and metabarcoding community survey) offer tested templates that airborne protocols can adapt rather than reinvent, leaving genuinely air-specific work concentrated on the sampling side, where capture physics differ most from water.
References
- Jager H et al. (2025). A breath of fresh air: comparative evaluation of passive versus active airborne eDNA sampling strategies. bioRxiv 2025.03.26.645491. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.26.645491
- Johnson M & Barnes MA (2024). Macrobial airborne environmental DNA analysis: a review of progress, challenges, and recommendations. Molecular Ecology Resources 24:e13998. https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13998
- NPL/LGC (2025). Standardising airborne eDNA for biodiversity monitoring: a UK collaboration to advance measurement science. National Physical Laboratory / National Measurement Laboratory at LGC. https://www.uknml.com/resources/standardising-airborne-edna-for-biodiversity-monitoring-a-uk-collaboration-to-advance-measurement-science-2/
- Sullivan AR et al. (2025). Airborne eDNA captures three decades of ecosystem biodiversity. Nature Communications 16:11281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67676-7
- Tournayre O et al. (2025). First national survey of terrestrial biodiversity using airborne eDNA. Scientific Reports 15:19247. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-03650-z
- Tulloch RL et al. (2025). Winds of Change: Charting a Pathway to Ecosystem Monitoring Using Airborne Environmental DNA. Environmental DNA 7:e70134. https://doi.org/10.1002/edn3.70134
- Warmer L et al. (2025). Validating airborne eDNA using manual surveys, acoustic monitoring and camera traps to detect birds and mammals in an agroforestry setting. Environmental DNA 7:e70222. https://doi.org/10.1002/edn3.70222