Advancing taxonomy discussion
A round table discussion with Rudolf Meier from Museum fur Naturkunde, on how his rapid, accurate, scalable, and cost-effective species discovery and delimitation methods can benefit Australian systematics and taxonomy.
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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 extremely difficult 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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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 aligns with the goals of initiatives such as Taxonomy Australia and the National Biodiversity DNA Library.
The CBA will host a seminar, followed by a round table discussion on Thursday 20 April at ANU to discuss Rudolf's work and its potential for Australian systematics and taxonomy. Participation in the discussion can be in person at ANU or online. We would appreciate you registering if you would like to attend the discussion so we have an idea of numbers.
Rudolf's visit is funded by the CBA Visiting Scientist program. Please get in touch if you would like to meet with him during his time in Canberra between 20-24 April.
Location
Please note: this discussion will be held in person in the Ecology Meeting Room and via Zoom, details are included below.
Ecology Meeting Room, 3rd floor, RN Robertson Building, Research School of Biology, ANU
Please click the link below to join the meeting online:
https://anu.zoom.us/j/84156401725?pwd=dkRFZGx6RTlQRjE2ZTkzdURTbWY0Zz09
Meeting ID: 841 5640 1725
Password: 940474
Canberra time: please check your local time & date if you are joining from elsewhere.
Upcoming events in this series
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Henry North from the University of Cambridge will present a hands-on workshop focused on the application of whole-genome population genomics to monitoring and managing invasive and endangered populations.
Paula Riccardi from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology will introduce a framework for contextualising large volumes of imaging and DNA barcoding data into taxonomic revisions and species descriptions.