Teresita Porter, research scientist with the Great Lakes Forestry Centre, Natural Resources Canada and a visiting research scientist with U of G’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics will discuss water and soil biodiversity and how they are essential to sustaining diverse ecosystem services and economic activities across Canada.

Porter’s research background is in ecology and evolution, mycology and bioinformatics. Her current work focuses on using genomics methods to monitor water quality, soil health and sustainability from environmental DNA. Porter has a special interest in how methodological bias affects the analysis of biodiversity and biomonitoring data.

Find more info on this talk and the CBG Seminar Series.

Metagenomics-Based Ecosystem Biomonitoring (Ecobiomics)
Water and soil biodiversity are essential to sustain diverse ecosystem services and economic activities across Canada. Genomics tools are ideal for characterizing complex biodiversity. Teresita Porter will introduce the Government of Canada’s Genomics Research and Development Initiative, focusing on one of their large interdepartmental projects, the Metagenomics-Based Ecosystem Biomonitoring (Ecobiomics) project. Porter will discuss the goals and organization of this five-year project. She will review some of the key areas where they have been able to standardize methods during field sampling, lab processing, sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. Porter’s area of expertise is in the bioinformatic handling and analysis of metabarcoding datasets, so she will take a shallow dive into the structure of their bioinformatic approach. Porter will discuss how they established a bulk soil sampling methodology that targets arthropods from bulk soil. She will also briefly introduce two ongoing projects that focus on using bulk soil metabarcoding to assess the sustainability of timber harvest.