As part of the activity “Wildlife detective: revealing the invisible wildlife around you”, students and teachers will learn how to efficiently monitor biodiversity with innovative approaches, based on modern, genetic methods. These approaches enable the understanding and research of many important wildlife features (what they eat, what kind of environment they live in, are their populations stable in nature, whether are they resistant to diseases, and how we identify the entire biodiversity in just one reaction, etc.).

Students and teachers will also learn the basics of field research, more precisely, how can we efficiently collect genetic samples from the environment (environmental DNA) or animals (e.g. collection of hair, faeces, and other traces). Appropriate collection and analysis, based on molecular data, enable the understanding of wildlife features and are consequently important for the species’ protection and management. We will also compete in i.e. eDNA bingo, developed by the international project Biodiversity Genomics Europe. The goal of the interactive game will be to identify unseen organisms based on the DNA sequences found in our samples.