Current main project
Large scale biodiversity surveys on land using airborne eDNA
A key objective in conservation is to establish real-time monitoring of community dynamics. This allows for immediate assessment of responses to disturbances and evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions aimed at mitigating biodiversity loss. Achieving this requires high-resolution spatio-temporal data collected regularly across large scales and multiple taxa. While there are mechanisms to monitor some species this way, methodologies vary widely making traditional taxon-specific surveys too labor-intensive and impractical for broad applications. In this project, we harness the potential of airborne eDNA for large scale biodiversity surveys on land.
Photo: Allen Tian
Some past projects
A Tree of Life metabarcoding approach to assess freshwater ecosystem health
Photo: Lucas Labeur
Freshwater ecosystems are complex, diverse and face a variety of imminent threats that have led to changes in both ecosystem structure and function. It is urgent that we develop and standardize monitoring tools allowing for rapid and comprehensive assessment of freshwater communities to understand their changing dynamics and to inform conservation. Environmental DNA surveys offer a means to inventory and monitor aquatic diversity, yet most studies focus on one or a few taxonomic groups only. In this study, we sought to 1) identify thoroughly validated, cost-efficient primer pair combinations that maximize detection of broad swaths of freshwater diversity, and 2) facilitate future primer pair selection by creating a free online and user-friendly tool.
Breeding phenology of a threatened frog species using eDNA and automatic acoustic monitoring
Climate change can drive shifts in breeding phenology, leading to phenological mismatches and conservation concern. Assessing phenology in rare or cryptic species can be challenging. In this study, we compared eDNA ddPCR and acoustic signals to investigate the breeding phenology of a trilling chorus frogs in Eastern Ontario. (Chen*, Tournayre* et al. 2023)
Photo: Allen Tian
Wild turkey predation on Blue racer
This project is part of a plan to inform several key recovery actions for blue racer in Ontario. Blue racer was added to the Species at Risk in Ontario list in 2008 due to its existence in Canada comprising only a small and isolated population on Pelee Island, and due to marked population decline. Wild turkeys have been introduced on Pelee Island for hunting activities, and are suspected to feed on SAR species such as blue racer. The goal was to develop a ddPCR assay to assess wild turkey predation on blue racer (Pelee island).
Photo: Maxime Leuchtmann
Population genetics and diet of the greater horseshoe bat in Western France
During my PhD, I worked on the greater horseshoe (GH) bat, an insectivorous bat species living in close proximity to humans. In 2016, this bat species was listed as Vulnerable on the regional Red list of the French Poitou-Charentes region. I used genetic tools to delineate and identify potential vulnerable populations in France and neigbhoring countries (microsatellites genotyping of ~1,000 patagium samples from France, Spanish basque Country, England and Tunisia; Tournayre et al. 2019).Then we developed a metabarcoding approach for the parallel identification of bat species and their preys without an over-amplification of predator DNA (Galan et al. 2018) and I compared twelve metabarcoding primer sets to optimize insectivorous bat diet description (Tournayre et al. 2020). Finally, I investigated whether life cycle and landscape influenced the diversity and the composition of the GH diet in the Poitou-Charentes region (Tournayre et al. 2021).