Tuesdays at Ten | Future Biodiversity of Streams & Rivers
Champaign Public Library
200 West Green Street
Champaign, Illinois 61820
(217) 403-2000
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Join us at the library for coffee, socializing, and learning something new.
Rivers and streams are exceptional ecosystems full of biodiversity like fish and insects, but this richness is declining rapidly. Conservation efforts to protect these systems require accurate information about species distributions and population dynamics, but conventional methods for aquatic surveys can be inefficient and may miss rare species.
One promising method with the potential to improve conservation is analyzing the traces of DNA and RNA that organisms leave behind in the water, but scientists are still investigating how environmental factors like water flow and temperature interact to control where and when this genetic material is detectable. Join us to learn more about this new method and its potential impact.
About the presenter: Dr. Ellie Snyder is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Illinois Natural History Survey. She recently completed her PhD in stream ecology at the University of Notre Dame, where she studied the fate and transport of environmental DNA (eDNA) in streams and rivers. She received an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology to return to Illinois and compare the effectiveness of eRNA for fish monitoring with eDNA and conventional sampling.