RIEL seminar series
Genomics-based monitoring of ants and termites for ecosystem change
| Presenter | Allyson Malpartida | |
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| Date/Time |
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| Contact person |
Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods
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| Location | Yellow 1, Level 1, Room 33 at CDU Casuarina Campus, and online via Zoom. All times are ACST. | |
| Open to | All International audience, CDU staff and students, Public | |
Allyson Malpartida is a PhD candidate and a Genomics Research Assistant within the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University.
Terrestrial invertebrates are valuable bioindicators in land management, but their wider use is limited by the time required for morphological identification and the shortage of taxonomic expertise. Allyson’s PhD explores how DNA metabarcoding and environmental DNA (eDNA) can help overcome this challenge in northern Australia. During the seminar ‘Genomics-Based Monitoring of Ants and Termites for Ecosystem Change’, Allyson will present this research.
Focusing on ants and termites as ecologically dominant terrestrial invertebrates, Allyson has developed and validated new metabarcoding assays and tested whether they could recover ecological patterns seen in morphological surveys.
Across fire and mine rehabilitation case studies, these methods have successfully detected community change, particularly for ants, and helped uncover errors in morphology-based datasets, demonstrating their potential for faster, more consistent and more accessible application in long-term monitoring programs, so long as it is supported by comprehensive DNA reference libraries.
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