Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Basin Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The US Geological Survey Water Resources Mission Area, in offering a funding opportunity to a CESU Partner to evaluate metagenomics as a means of assessing the health of riverine benthic macroinvertebrate communities.  The project's first phase (FY22) is to collect eDNA samples at approximately 200 reference-quality sites throughout the basin.  Next (FY23), results from metabarcoding analyses of those samples will be combined with data on the environmental features of sampled sites.  The goal of this combined dataset is to develop machine-learning models that predict community composition using environmental features. The project is more likely to succeed if current gaps in species barcode libraries are filled.