I am a PhD student in David Jacobs' lab at UCLA, and I am broadly interested in evolution and biogeography. Currently, I am involved in many different projects involving population genomics, ancient DNA of threatened fauna, as well as eDNA. Together with the CALeDNA team I hope to use this exciting technique to study communities and ecosystems, and how they are impacted by human activities. In the future, I wish to work at a museum where I can expand my research on aDNA and also engage in the popularization of science.
CALeDNA Thanks UC Davis SEEDS
In early 2017, the UC Davis SEEDS group (that stands for Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability) connected with us with a will to help. They held several Skype meetings with our team and brought a CALeDNA workshop to the UC Davis campus. We were worried that being largely in southern California, the CALeDNA core team wouldn't be able to recruit citizen science help up north. Boy were we wrong! SEEDS has organized trips to several UC Natural Reserves and has facilitated training on how to use the app and the kit, while managing the distribution of supplies. SEEDS members have brought in their partners, family, and friends to sample for CALeDNA, and hearing their responses to the program has shaped our strategy forward. We thank UC Davis SEEDS and hope that other campuses develop such proactive and integrative student groups!
Introducing our new eDNA researchers!
We're less than a week away from our second 2017 bioblitz so now's the time to show off all the work UC students have been doing. Our first 2017 bioblitz was with an iMicrobiologist class visiting Sedgewick Reserve (about 5 hours North of Los Angeles). There, they teamed up with graduate student Gaurav Kandlikar to collect samples from experimental field plots where different combinations of plants are growing. This way, we can understand how plants might interact through utilizing the soil microbiome to influence the growth, and ultimately, the survival, of their neighbors. Gaurav has been doing eDNA research training with us since the start of the Winter quarter and we're really excited to see how he's applying the eDNA techniques to his own research and sharing his research with students who are budding their own questions about nature from it!
Meet Gaurav, PhD student at UCLA.
Gaurav grew up with a deep love for animal and plant diversity in the forests of the Western Ghats of India, which has developed into a fascination with the drivers of biodiversity generation and maintenance. He is currently working on describing the environmental and physiological diversity of species coexistence in a California annual plant community for his PhD research with Dr. Nathan Kraft. With the UC Conservation Genomics Consortium, he is characterizing the soil microbial community across experimental plots in the UC-Sedgwick Reserve to ask whether variation in soil microbial communities might interact with physical and chemical environmental properties to influence plant performance and species interactions. After his graduate work, Gaurav hopes to continue teaching and conducting biodiversity research in South- and South-East Asian forests.
Gaurav's iNaturalist page: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/5047188
His Twitter: @integralprotein
Testing the Kit
Before asking you to go out into the field we needed to design and test the kit. Here are some photos from our test days:
