Ms Allyson Malpartida1
1Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia
Terrestrial invertebrates are widely promoted as bioindicators in environmental assessment because they dominate faunal biomass, play many ecological roles, are highly sensitive to environmental change and are readily sampled. However, their use is limited because sample processing can be very time consuming and identification requires specialist taxonomic expertise. Genomics technologies have the potential to meet these challenges.
Genetic techniques such as environmental DNA (eDNA) and metabarcoding in biological monitoring have the potential to transform the way we assess terrestrial ecosystem health as it can effectively characterize biodiversity at a faster, cheaper and more scalable rate than traditional methods. However, its success for species-specific identification depends on the availability of reference libraries of DNA sequences and the taxonomic resolution of PCR amplicon sequences used.
Ants and termites are particularly important invertebrate groups for monitoring minesite rehabilitation because of their high functional importance in ecosystems, especially relating to soil formation and nutrient cycling. They have been identified as focal groups for monitoring ecosystem restoration at Ranger uranium mine, which is surrounded by World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory (NT). To help inform Rangers restoration trajectory, I will assess ant and termite communities from two rehabilitated mines in the NT. My project will investigate the optimal methods for extracting DNA from baited and terrestrial substrates, designing new metabarcoding primers and workflows for species-specific identification of ants and termites and the spatial and temporal issues associated with sampling invertebrates at minesites in the seasonal Australian tropics.
Biography:
Allyson is studying for her PhD with the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods (RIEL) at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. Her research relates to ecosystem restoration using the mining industry as a case study where the environmental impact it has can be very high on local ecosystems, and rehabilitation efforts are costly and difficult to truly measure. Using ants and termites as indicators of rehabilitation, Allyson is applying metabarcoding of DNA samples by capturing each species’ genetic signature at former mine sites to analyse the health of the ecosystem. This could lead to robust long-term ecosystem monitoring techniques based on data from DNA sequences.