Fig. 3

Map of the known distribution (NBN Atlas) of the top 4 most detected non domestic mammals, birds, arthropods and plants using airborne eDNA collected by the UK national ambient air quality monitoring network (185 eDNA samples at 15 sites from September 2021 to October 2022). The black and grey dots represent NBN Atlas confirmed observations for 2022 and all other years, respectively. Note that for arthropods, Cricotopus was in the top 4 but was not mapped because there were only unconfirmed records in NBN Atlas, and Columba livia, Columba palumbus, Pica pica and Erithacus rubecula had too many records in NBN Atlas (upper downloadable limit = 500,000 records), so only 2018 to 2022, 2022, 2021–2022, and 2022 records were used for these taxa respectively. The red crosses indicate the sites at which the taxa were detected using airborne eDNA, with a 18.6 km buffer area shaded in red (i.e. median of the estimated transportation distances). The sites where eDNA was not detected are indicated in blue (18.6 km buffer area). The maps were created using the ggplot2⁸¹, dplyr⁸³, sf⁸⁶ and rnaturalearth⁸⁷ R packages. The NBN Atlas occurrence were downloaded at https://nbnatlas.org (accessed on 12 August 2024; data resource citations are available on FigShare using https://figshare.com/s/04229506308da822449c). All the PhyloPic silhouettes belong to the public domain, except for Ectopsocus (credit to Graham Montgomery, no changes, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).