At Jonah, we can comfortably process and analyze for metabarcoding 100,000 samples a year. An interesting thought experiment is if we were to turn this capacity loose on a single question, what could we accomplish?
In the aquatic realm, 100k samples is enough to sample every 35 miles of streams in the US. Or one out of every 5 lakes in the lower 48 states. There are approximately 100k miles of coastline in the US. That’s one sample for every mile of coast.
At ~$100/sample, that means it would cost just $10M to pay for the analyses to survey our streams, lakes, or coastline at relatively high density.
So why isn’t something like this happening? Where’s the bottleneck? $10M is not an inordinate amount of money for our governments or many philanthropic organizations. That was the cost of a single 30-second ad on the Super Bowl. Can’t just be the money. Is it too logistically difficult to accumulate 100k samples? Maybe, but 1k or 10k shouldn’t be, and we haven’t started with this. Are there political reasons that are preventing this for coming to fruition? Definitely some, but not enough to prevent this entirely.
If we had to guess, our opinion is that it is first a lack of imagination. Biodiversity surveys at these scales have rarely been imagined, no less formalized in proposals. Part and parcel with this, we have been conditioned to undervalue these surveys.
All of this deserves more discussion, but it is interesting that we have the means to analyze samples for any of these surveys. 300k samples wouldn’t be that much a stretch if someone wanted to do all three: streams, lakes, and coastline.