Accounting for Biodiversity With Environmental DNA

Economic decision‐making is increasingly expected to incorporate biodiversity measures alongside traditional financial indicators. Specifically, natural capital accounting (NCA) frameworks aim to link ecosystem condition and services to policy and economic outcomes. In practice, however, NCA implementation is constrained by a lack of biodiversity data that are sufficiently comprehensive for detailed and consistent reporting across space and time. Here, we identify environmental DNA (eDNA)‐based biodiversity monitoring as a scalable tool for generating biodiversity inputs suitable for NCA. We explore the characteristics of eDNA methods and metrics that align with NCA requirements and present a conceptual illustration of how eDNA‐derived biodiversity information could be integrated into environmental accounts. Finally, we identify incomparability as a key limitation of current eDNA‐derived biodiversity estimates, arising from both the sensitivity of metabarcoding to rare taxa as well as the influence of methodological choices on species detection. We argue that standardization of specific eDNA workflows, as well as statistical harmonization of ecological inference, will enable delivery of biodiversity metrics suitable for broadscale NCA applications.