Question about sedaDNA data

SedaDNA stands for Sedimentary ancient DNA and is extracted from sediment cores in lakes, at archaeological sites, and in marine environments. How can sedaDNA-derived occurrence data be published correctly? Essentially, it is metabarcoding data with an age tag ranging from 10,000 years ago to the present day (eDNA). A guideline would be helpful to inform the current development of metadata standards for ancient DNA MIxS-MInAS. This would enable the ancient DNA community to publish their data to platforms like OBIS and GBIF effectively.

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Ping @Saara, @EmilieBoulanger and maybe @sformel :slight_smile:

@AndreasAltenburger good question, and I’m not sure. I found this example of a sedaDNA dataset we pulled in from Mgnify: Preservation of ancient eukaryotic DNA in methane hydrate-associated marine sediments. | Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS)

It looks like there is something broken with the parsing since I can’t see the occurrences. I will pull an issue for @pieterprovoost .

I’ve been around MInAS a little through the GSC but not had much experience with it. The simplest solution would be to map it to the DwC DNA extension and add that information to the DNA Guide. Do you think anyone from the MInAS community would have time to make that map?

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I will ask at MInAS. Just to clarify, there is no hesitation from OBIS about including “ancient” data (up to 10,000 years ago)? I think this should be flagged in some way for users conducting occurrence searches, so that data points referring to species occurrences from thousands of years ago (based on sedaDNA) are not confused with current occurrences based on human observations. A lack of distinction could have an unwanted impact on current species distribution models that are based on OBIS data.

No, I wasn’t clear. I thing we should hesitate, but only for the purpose of getting the DwC mapping correct and for tagging the datasets as ancient. Those two things would help me feel comfortable that the data would be queried and reused correctly.

Both of those initiatives would require a champion, perhaps via the DCG. Would you be interested in serving in that role?