Recent funding for ‘Managing regime shifts and fisheries collapse on the Great Barrier Reef – the role of ancient DNA’ was awarded from BGI Australia’s call for proposals on new research involving genomic applications in biodiversity and evolution.
This research project will allow us to gain insight into the palaeoecology of reef organisms that do not leave a substantial fossil record by analyzing the ancient environmental DNA that has been preserved in the marine sediment.
In collaboration with BGI Australia and the Riginos lab at UQ, we will reconstruct past occurrences of several important reef organisms, including macro-algae and fish, over a gradient of increasing human impact.