New national initiative to harness genomics for Australia’s ecosystem monitoring and resilience management
The Sentinel Species Genomics Initiative is a three-year collaboration between Bioplatforms Australia and Minderoo Foundation to coordinate the development of genomic resources for ecologically informative species across critical ecosystems in Australia. This initiative will strengthen our understanding of ecosystem resilience and environmental change, while enabling more effective conservation, restoration, and climate management decisions.
Environmental monitoring programs play a central role in detecting ecosystem change and guiding conservation and restoration actions. However, monitoring can tell us what is changing without always revealing why – or how – resilient species and ecosystems are responding to that change.
Certain species play key ecological roles in structuring habitats and maintaining ecosystem function. These include habitat-forming species such as corals and seagrasses, as well as species that respond rapidly to environmental disturbance, such as amphibians and insects. Together, these groups can provide complementary biological signals of ecosystem condition. Changes in their genetic diversity, population connectivity and adaptive variation can reveal early signs of environmental stress, resilience and ecological transition.
The Sentinel Species Genomics Initiative will create the underpinning referential and population-level genomics data resources for ecologically informative species across critical Australian ecosystems. These resources will improve the biological interpretation of existing environmental monitoring, advance understanding of ecosystem resilience and provide the evidence needed to guide conservation and restoration strategies.
The initiative will be delivered through two complementary themes.
Theme 1 – Ecosystem-forming species campaigns will coordinate national genomic efforts focused initially on corals, seagrasses, kelps and mangroves. These campaigns will bring together researchers, monitoring programs, and ecosystem managers to coordinate sampling, sequencing and analysis to generate comparable genomic datasets across species and regions.
Theme 2 – Biological indicator species will create genomics resources that will support discovery of species that may provide early biological signals of environmental change. Researchers, government agencies, and environmental organisations will be invited to nominate candidate species through open national calls, creating opportunities to identify and test new genomic indicators across Australia’s terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments.
Together, these activities will enhance national genomic resources to better understand ecosystem resilience in response to drivers of change. The resulting resources will help identify resilient and vulnerable populations, guide genetically informed conservation and restoration, improve preparedness and recovery following environmental disturbance, and identify species that could provide early warning of ecological change.
The Sentinel Species Genomics Initiative will help Australia move beyond detecting environmental change to understanding its biological drivers, vulnerabilities and resilience in order to better inform and guide management strategies.
Learn more on our website: https://bioplatforms.com/project/sentinel-species-genomics-initiative/