REVIEW: The detection of aquatic animal species using environmental DNA – a review of eDNA as a survey tool in ecology

Summary Knowledge of species distribution is critical to ecological management and conservation biology. Effective management requires the detection of populations, which can sometimes be at low densities and is usually based on visual detection and counting. Recently, there has been considerable interest in the detection of short species‐specific environmental DNA (e DNA ) fragments to allow aquatic species monitoring within different environments due to the potential of greater sensitivity over traditional survey methods which can be time‐consuming and costly. Environmental DNA analysis is increasingly being used in the detection of rare or invasive species and has also been applied to e DNA persistence…