EVENTS

American Sāmoa | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 from 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Hawaiʻi | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 from 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Palau | THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 from 9:00-10:15 a.m.
CNMI & Guam | THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 from 10:00-11:15 a.m.
FSM | THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 from 10:00-11:15 a.m. (Weno) / 11:00-12:15 p.m. (Palikir)
RMI | THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 from 12:00-1:15 p.m. New Zealand | THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 from 12:00-1:15 p.m.

 A Webinar presented by the Pacific Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Management Network (Pacific RISCC)

Webinar Details:

Title: Molecular Approaches to Invasion Risk and Ecosystem Health Across Indo-Pacific Islands

Webinar Description:

Across the Pacific, DNA-based surveys such as environmental DNA (eDNA), bulk-sample metabarcoding, and diet and pollinator sampling have transformed how quickly and cheaply we can characterize arthropod communities. But every one of these methods rests on the same foundation: a reference library of DNA sequences linked to expertly identified, vouchered specimens. For Pacific island arthropods, that foundation is strikingly incomplete. Of the terrestrial arthropod species already known to be introduced to the Hawaiian Islands, only about 60% have a sequence for the standard barcode marker, COI, in public databases. Widen the lens to the Indo-Pacific and the gap grows: of roughly 14,000 arthropod species with occurrence records across the region, only about 5,100, barely a third, have a COI sequence in GenBank at all. A species absent from the library is invisible to every survey that depends on it. This talk describes an ongoing multi-institution effort to build a standardized genetic and biogeographic reference library for arthropods across the Indo-Pacific, spanning Hawaiʻi, Guam, the Mariana Islands, with the hope of including additional islands across the pacific. More importantly, this talk will describe what becomes possible once that library exists. I will trace how reference data feed iteratively into downstream applications: horizon scans that rank not-yet-arrived species by invasion risk, species distribution and network models that ask where species could establish and how they move among islands, and community-level metrics (proportion of non-native taxa, loss of feeding guilds, shifts in interaction network structure) that function as indicators of ecosystem health and resilience. Climate change enters at nearly every step. Climate matching between native and recipient ranges is a core input to invasion risk scoring; warming is redistributing arthropod communities along elevation gradients on high islands; and disturbance events such as fire, drought, and storms open windows for establishment precisely when monitoring capacity is most stretched. I will close with the design question this work keeps returning to: what does a Pacific-wide molecular monitoring network need to look like to still be useful in thirty years?

Speaker details:

Natalie Graham is an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where she directs the ʻElala Biodiversity Lab. Her research uses ecological genetics and genomics, including DNA barcoding, metabarcoding, and environmental DNA, to understand how island arthropod communities assemble, how they shift as non-native species arrive, and what that turnover reveals about ecosystem health and resilience. She earned her PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley in 2021, following an MS in Biology from Sonoma State University. She currently co-directs a multi-institution effort to build a genetic and biogeographic reference library for invasive terrestrial arthropods across the Indo-Pacific. She also works on the responsible use of genomic data from Indigenous lands.