Abstract Detail

Frontiers in Botany: Environmental DNA as an Emerging Tool for Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Plant Biodiversity

Evans, Darren M. [1].

Molecular ecology as a tool for understanding pollination and other plant-insect interactions .

Advances in molecular ecology offer unprecedented opportunities to understand the ecology and evolution of plants and insects, the complex ways in which they interact and their role in ecosystem functioning. Rapidly developing DNA sequencing technologies are resolving previously intractable questions in taxonomic and functional biodiversity and provide significant potential to determine formerly difficult to observe plant–insect interactions. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art and critically appraise the range of molecular approaches currently available for the study of insect pollination, host–parasitoid interactions and/or wider food-web studies. In particularly, I will focus on novel eDNA techniques to discover which insects have visited flowers (plant-focussed) and which plants insects have visited (insect-focussed) based on remnant DNA. Species- interaction data are increasingly being incorporated into ecological network analyses. DNA metabarcoding offers opportunities to scale-up efforts to create large, highly resolved, phylogenetically structured networks within an exciting framework to study pressing questions in ecology and evolution.

1 - Newcastle University, School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Office 6.06, Agriculture Building, King's Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

Keywords:
plant-insect interactions
eDNA
Phylogenetic Networks
food-webs.

Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY3, Frontiers in Botany: Environmental DNA as an Emerging Tool for Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Plant Biodiversity
Location: /
Date: Tuesday, July 20th, 2021
Time: 11:15 AM(EDT)
Number: SY3004
Abstract ID:620
Candidate for Awards:None