Conservation biology with a focus on improving species detectability and increasing occurrence data.
To protect biodiversity we need to understand how it’s distributed across time and space. My research aims to increase our ability to collect high volumes of reliable vertebrate species observations, which form occurrence datasets vital to informing applied conservation. The first step towards this for many species is working out how to find them in the first place! I am particularly interested in molecular methods for increasing our ability to detect rare, elusive species, including barcoding DNA from the blood meals of their parasites (invertebrate-derived DNA). I focus mainly on amphibians because among vertebrates they represent many of the poorest-known and difficult to detect, yet highly threatened species, and their parasites are well-suited to iDNA surveys.
