Conservation Genetics & Genomics
One of the ongoing questions in our lab is the conservation status of species that have either management implications or conservation concerns. An overarching question is how global climate change or other global forcings such as land use change (urbanization) may further reduced population numbers for many of these species. Most of our work is on aquatic species, but we are also looking at the population genetics of Aedes aegypti (the yellow fever mosquito) in the United States with our collaborators in the Michael Reiskind lab. In addition, we investigated the role of local adaptation structuring the eastern oyster using an ecological genetic approach using a reciprocal transplant of parental and hybrid crosses. We use a variety of molecular tools to address these questions including microsatellite loci, sequences of mtDNA and nucDNA genes, genomics using RADseq and ddRADseq, and eDNA.
