Steve Burnell1, Priscila Goncalves1, Madalyn Cooper1, Sebastian Rauschert1, Julie Robidart1, Shannon Corrigan1, Eric Raes1, Marcelle Ayad1, Philipp Bayer1, Jessica Pearce1
1 The Minderoo Foundation, Perth 6000, WA.
Our ocean is incredibly vast and largely understudied. Collecting data on what animals are present and where, and how they respond to human pressure and environmental changes is critical to designing effective management policies for ocean conservation. The Minderoo Foundation’s OceanOmics program is working with globally-renowned researchers and technology partners, committed to innovate in the use of eDNA to measure biodiversity, revolutionising the scale to survey ocean wildlife, making surveys faster, more precise and lower in cost, without disturbing marine life. An initial focus of the program was the transformation of the vessel Pangaea Ocean Explorer, into an end-to-end platform for marine genomics research, including high-throughput sequencing at sea. Over the last two years, this vessel enabled 10 research expeditions across Australia, and represents a powerful asset for the establishment of biodiversity baselines and long-term biomonitoring programs to protect marine wildlife and ecosystem health. We have just opened the Minderoo-University of Western Australia OceanOmics Centre to accelerate our work. To enable eDNA-based marine biodiversity characterisation, OceanOmics is also investing in generating and openly publishing reference genomic resources for thousands of species of marine vertebrates, as well as in developing the most comprehensive analytical tools for marine sequencing data based on standardised, reproducible processes and artificial intelligence. We believe that eDNA-based marine genomics can form the technological basis for innovations that will transform how we measure, understand, and ultimately conserve life in the ocean.
Biography:
Biography to come