fundamentals of eDNA

This week we talked about bioinformatics and data management. I have to say, if I knew about bioinformatics/metabarcoding before starting my master’s, I probably would have gone this route instead of qPCR/something single-species! This is a field that I’m still very much getting my feet wet in but I am excited to be learning so much about it. I can see this bioinformatics becoming particularly useful for species that we can’t easily tell apart - for example, in our vernal pool systems we have potentially multiple species of fairy shrimp (the detection of which grants automatic protections to the pool), but identifying them to a species level is very difficult and something very few people in the world are familiar with. We also have an amazing complex of salamanders in the northeast where we have unisexual hybrids of Jefferson’s, Blue-spotted, Spotted, and Tiger Salamanders that have variable ploidy and essentially self-replicate, but can be hard to differentiate from true native species that are often of greater conservation concern than the unisexual morphs. I look forward to learning more about this technology and hopefully getting a good enough grip on it to use it!