Across a Swiss meadow and into its forested edges, the drone dragged a jumbo-size cotton swab from a 13-foot tether. Along its path, the moistened swab collected scraps of life: some combination of sloughed skin and hair; mucus, saliva, and blood splatters; pollen flecks and fungal spores.

Later, biologists used a sequencer about the size of a phone to stream the landscape’s DNA into code, revealing dozens upon dozens of species, some endangered, some invasive. The researchers never saw the wasps, stink bugs, or hawk moths whose genetic signatures they collected. But all of those, and many more, were out there.

The researchers, from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, were field-testing a new approach to biodiversity monitoring, in this case to map insect life across different kinds of vegetation. They make up one of many teams now deploying a suite of technologies to track nature at a resolution and pace once unimaginable for taxonomists. “We know a lot more about what’s happening,” Camille Albouy, an environmental scientist at ETH Zurich, and member of the team, told me, “even if a lot still escapes us.”

Today, autonomous robots collect DNA while state-of-the-art sequencers process genetic samples quickly and cheaply, and machine-learning algorithms detect life by sound or shape. These technologies are revolutionizing humanity’s ability to catalog Earth’s species, which are estimated to number 8 million—though perhaps