2020

October 2020: I gave a virtual seminar for the Society of Canadian Limnologists – watch my talk here.

July 2020: Beth Clare and I have been awarded EPSRC IAA funding for research on air filtration and animal DNA.

May 2020: I have accepted a role as digital champion for postgraduate teaching. I will be supporting other lecturers and staff in moving teaching online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

April 2020: My first preprint is out from work with McGill University and the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area. This is probably my favourite paper that I’ve ever written. In it we find that fish eDNA becomes “stratified” according to the temperature preferences of the fish. The thermocline has a powerful structuring force in isolating the eDNA of warm water fish to lake surfaces while eDNA of cold water fish is trapped at the depths during summer stratification. During lake turnover, water mixing combined with the movements of fish mean that eDNA composition at different depths is much more similar. Important implications for designing your freshwater eDNA monitoring scheme – contact me to discuss.

Update: This work was published open access in Molecular Ecology and was also part of a BioScience write-up by science journalist Lesley Ogden. Read the BioScience article here and my writeup for Massive Science platform.