Environmental DNA metabarcoding as a way to improve biodiversity assessment in LCA for regenerative agriculture in Finland

Abstract

Biodiversity loss is strongly influenced by land use transformation on farms, overexploitation of resources and deterioration of soil and water health due to pollution. Regenerative agriculture (RA), which is one of the agroecological practices, has proven to be effective in terms of biodiversity conservation and restoration globally in general, and in Finland in particular. However, there is a lack of standardized methods that can comprehensively assess biodiversity of products systems or along product life cycles. This issue can be solved by environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding and life cycle assessment (LCA). eDNA, which is a method with simultaneous determination of various taxa in different land use types, can provide more accurate and updated inventory data for LCIA. To find ways to integrate eDNA data into LCA models, an in-depth literature review was conducted to scrutinize various trends of correlation between eDNA-, LCA-, RA- and biodiversity-related studies. As a result, the tremendous gap in the combination of these studies was proved, suggesting possible reasons for this and ways of further elaboration. Based on literature analysis, an eDNA sampling strategy in RA was proposed, which is also applicable to Finland. Due to limitations with specificity of spatial distribution of biodiversity, the lack of RA standardization and absence of use of eDNA results in LCA models, ways to adjust characterization factors, reference state and baseline for more precise biodiversity assessment in LCA models were proposed. The following improvements were also presented to further enhance the approach.