Cooperative Agreement for affiliated Partner with Great Basin Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research in species barcoding. Environmental DNA (eDNA) is potentially a powerful new tool to monitor and assess the status of aquatic ecosystems and the societal values they support such as recreational fishing and species protection. Assessments based on metabarcoding can detect a wide array of species from microbes to fish, providing more comprehensive and cost-effect assessments than existing techniques. However, one pressing need in developing metabarcoding assessment tools is to enhance existing libraries of aquatic species barcodes.

The USGS Water Resources Mission Area is leading a pilot project in the Rocky Mountains to evaluate metagenomics as a means of monitoring and assessing aquatic species. Metagenomics data from field samples will be combined with large geospatial datasets to develop artificial intelligence and machine-learning models that predict community composition. The project is more likely to succeed if current gaps in species barcode libraries are filled.