Rudolf Meier | Center for Biodiversity Analysis visitor | 20-24 April

Prof. Rudolf Meier is the head of the Center for Integrative Biodiversity Discovery at the Museum für Naturkunde where he and his lab are at the forefront of novel methods to accelerate biodiversity discovery and monitoring using robotics, machine learning imaging and nanopore sequencing.

The main foci of this work are the hyper-diverse invertebrate groups that are traditionally very hard to sort, identify and describe – "dark taxa", groups for which <10% of all species are described and the estimated diversity exceeds 1000 species.

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• DiversityScanner: Robotic handling of small invertebrates with machine learning methods

Meier’s lab develops new, rapid, accurate, scalable, and cost-effective species discovery and delimitation methods. Their innovative combination of molecular and morphological workflows has the potential to help tackle the otherwise daunting issues of accelerating discovery in hyper-diverse taxa and establishing robust eDNA approaches, with links to taxonomy (and hence ecology) for environmental and biosecurity monitoring.

As such, Meier’s visit to Canberra will be of considerable interest to the Australian systematics and taxonomy community and align with the goals of initiatives such as Taxonomy Australia and the National Biodiversity DNA Library.

The CBA will host a seminar, followed by lunch, then a round table discussion. Participation can be in person at ANU or online.