Invasive species threaten native biota, put fragile ecosystems at risk and have the potential for large-scale impact on primary industries.
The incursion risk is ever-increasing, due to growing trade networks and the popularity of personal travel, compounded by global climate change.
The ability to predict invasion pathways or potential biological incursions before detection at the border provides preventative rather than corrective action.
Predicting biological incursion and targeting high-risk pathways would therefore give Aotearoa New Zealand the upper hand in preventing establishment of unwanted pest species.
As climate change continues to rapidly affect the environment, such changes will naturally influence the ability of species to establish within a new niche that previously would have been inhospitable.
By detecting genomic traits associated with invasiveness, we can identify traits under selection that benefit an organism when it arrives in a new habitat.
As a postdoctoral fellow based at Manaaki-Whenua Landcare Research, Amy Vaughan’s current work focuses on utilising large population resequencing data of known invasive and non-invasive insect species. A trained machine-learning pipeline will be developed to predict genomic signatures associated with invasiveness and for categorising invasiveness potential.
This project would seek to classify signatures from various datatypes for priority species that are currently a threat to New Zealand’s border, and in the future for those that are yet to arrive.
About Amy
Amy did her undergraduate and master’s degrees at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, before moving to New Zealand to complete her PhD at Lincoln University.
During her PhD Amy curated datasets of bacterial chromosomal sequences of entomopathogens and their non-pathogenic conspecifics, with the goal of investigating the genomic drivers of evolution in entomopathogenic bacteria for the future selection of highly efficacious biocontrol agents.
This kickstarted an interest in all things ‘omics, leading to pursuing research projects in important questions pertinent to maintaining the ecosystems we have here in New Zealand.
Area of expertise:
• Comparative genomics
• Microbiology
Read more about Invasomics here