The 18-page booklet “Growing Cherries and Thoughts About Other Fruits” relays Jesse Ausubel’s talk given at the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club on 19 July 2022.
News
Loglet Lab 5 in development
Loglet Lab 4 is experiencing some difficulties, so users may receive errors on the more complex analysis. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to alleviate the problems. Meanwhile, with the addition of Albert Strusberg to our team (David Burg, Jason Yung, Perrin Meyer), Loglet Lab 5 is under intensive development and should be available before the end of 2022. Stay tuned.
Salamander eDNA student project awarded top prize in 2022 GENIUS Olympiad
Mark Stoeckle’s mentee, Samara Davis, earned the Grand prize in Science at the Genius Olympiad, an international high school project competition about environment issues, with her project on censusing threatened salamanders with eDNA (slide deck). See the full list of awardees here. Samara’s 11-minute video is here.
eDNA work in progress
We post a Schematic of an eDNA metabarcoding protocol for marine fish.
We recently showed that current laboratory protocols optimize sensitivity and reproducibility, especially for more abundant fish populations (ICES J Mar Sci 2022). eDNA metabarcoding is generally considered a qualitative tool for relative abundance. We hope to help develop eDNA metabarcoding as a quantitative tool for absolute abundance (link to pdf work-in-progress).
eDNA Detection of Salamanders
PHE student Samara Davis will present her work with Mark Stoeckle on eDNA detection of threatened salamanders at Northeast Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Annual Meeting https://northeastparc.org, to be held in West Virginia in August.
eDNA degradation; 2nd National Workshop
PHE’s guest investigator David Thaler offers some stimulating ideas in a memo about ways of understanding and learning from degradation of aquatic eDNA. The title: How long has each particular species’ eDNA been outside the organism from which it came? Some thoughts on the possibility to obtain more information from eDNA analysis of water samples
Meanwhile, Jesse Ausubel and Mark Stoeckle are involved in the program for the 2nd US National Workshop on eDNA, 12-15 September in Southern California. PHE hosted the 1st US national meeting in 2018.
PHE eDNA student project a finalist in 2022 Genius Olympiad
Samara Davis’s salamander eDNA project is a finalist in 2022 Genius Olympiad. Genius Olympiad is an international high school project competition about environmental issues founded and organized by Terra Science and Education and hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Olympiad will host projects in five general disciplines with an environmental focus.
Marine Plastics keynote talk
Jesse Ausubel gave the opening talk on “A Cleaner Ocean” to the conference From Research to Action: Responding to Plastic Pollution through Science organized by the Embassy of France Office for Science and Technology in the United States, Global Council for Science and Environment (GCSE), and Long Island University 5-6 April in New York City.
Iddo and colleagues publish paper on better global forest management to sequester carbon
The paper ‘Managing existing forests can mitigate climate change‘ published in the journal Forest Ecology and management discusses the advantages of better management of existing global forests to sequester carbon drawing on National Forest Inventory data from Scandinavian forests over the period 1960-2017.
Call for Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds
A paper by the Working Group on Acoustic Measurement of Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots of the International Quiet Ocean Experiment (IQOE) published “Sounding the Call for a Global Library of Biological Underwater Sounds” in the journal “Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.” Congratulations to Miles Parsons, Aran Mooney, Lucia di Iorio and company on a landmark contribution, which should become a major acoustic goal of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
Terry Collins’ press release contains a superb description of the paper as well as snippets of sound from a toadfish, piranha, gurnard fish, sea urchin, crab, and whale and information about 14 sound libraries.
The Guardian, United Kingdom Fish love songs and fighting talk: underwater sound library to reveal language of the deep
El Mundo, Madrid, La ‘biblioteca’ de los sonidos submarinos: los científicos graban el coro natural de los habitantes del océano
Popular Science, Why ocean researchers want to create a global library of undersea sounds