Symposium Title: Novel and Emerging Technologies in Species Identification and Conservation

Symposium Abstract: Conservation and management of aquatic organisms and ecosystems rely on a thorough understanding of species’ distribution and/or community composition. However, distributional and compositional data can be difficult to obtain across relevant scales due to limited resources and potential logistical issues associated with certain taxa (e.g., sampling cryptic or threatened and endangered species). In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of focus on the utilization of short species-specific environmental DNA (eDNA) fragments to determine species’ distribution and community composition, particularly within the context of the aforementioned limitations. We invite contributions from diverse regions and ecosystems that utilize novel and emerging technologies to assess and facilitate management of aquatic populations and communities. We particularly encourage contributions that explore both the advantages of, and difficulties associated with, utilizing emerging detection methods to characterize and assess aquatic communities and assemblages. While we welcome all emerging technologies, this symposium will focus on the utility of eDNA as a detection and management tool. Toward that end, we welcome both conventional presence and absence (i.e., PCR), and more quantitative (i.e., qPCR, RT-PCR, Next-generation sequencing) technologies.

If interested in participating, please respond to:

Yvette Halley: Yvette.Halley@mail.wvu.edu or Eric Merriam: Emerriam@mail.wvu.edu