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Environmental DNA

Monday, February 24 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

The Amazing World of Environmental DNA

Monday, February 24 @ 7:30 pm

Let’s join Professor Elizabeth Clare of York University’s Clare Lab as she presents the amazing world of environmental DNA.  To learn more about her work, please see https://www.yorku.ca/professor/eclare/

Professor Clare writes, there is little doubt that biodiversity is in decline in every taxonomic group and in every ecosystem. What is less clear, is how to measure this. Techniques to measure biodiversity suffer from common problems, they are too taxon specific, they are too labour intensive, those that work at large scales lack resolution, those with high resolution do not scale. And despite UN sustainability goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity and numerous transnational agreements to monitor biodiversity and mitigate its loss, we have very little idea how to do this. The common conclusions is that we lack the infrastructure for large scale monitoring. 

However, we may be wrong? 
 
DNA is everywhere. It is shed by all animals, plants and microbes into the environment all the time. We leave it behind, like a molecular footprint everywhere we go. It sticks to every surface, it floats around in rivers and lakes, and now we know it moves through the air around us. This is gives us an astonishing non-invasive way to monitor life on earth with minimal taxon specificity and with minimal effort. And, to our amazement, it appears there is infrastructure around the world collecting this material by accident. In this presentation we will explore the amazing world of “environmental DNA” which is one of the fastest growing areas of biodiversity science. We will look at the development of this field from mammoth DNA trapped in ice to bat DNA wafting around caves and we will talk about the chance to harness the power of thousands of air quality monitoring stations to track life on land at an unprecedented scale.

This will be a hybrid meeting and you can choose to attend either in-person or via Zoom.  Meeting starts at 7:30 PM and the presenter will be on at approximately 8:00 PM or shortly thereafter.

To attend via Zoom, register at: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/3CtvChNuRKONr8cW1umA1Q

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

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Email:

programs@waterlooregionnature.ca

Knox Presbyterian Church Hall

50 Erb St W
Waterloo, ON N2L 1T1 Canada

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