Project R-16673

Reconstructing century-scale changes in Philippine reef fish communities using sponge-derived environmental DNA (Research)

This PhD project aims to use sea sponges as natural environmental DNA (eDNA) samplers to reconstruct and assess trends in reef fish communities in the Philippines across more than a century. Understanding these long-term patterns is critical to guide conservation by evaluating how protection measures and human pressures have shaped these communities. The project builds on historic sponge and fish collections from the 1907–1910 Albatross Philippine Expedition, along with fish survey records from the 1970s, 2010s, 2020s, and ongoing citizen science initiatives. It focuses on developing and optimizing protocols for extracting historical eDNA from preserved Albatross sponge specimens to reconstruct early twentieth century fish assemblages. Contemporary sponge-derived eDNA will be collected from nearby reefs using the same metabarcoding pipeline for comparability. These data will be integrated with multi-decadal fish survey records and validated through citizen science campaigns using a Bayesian spatio-temporal data fusion framework that accounts for imperfect detection and sampling differences. By combining these sources, the project will quantify long-term changes in fish diversity and community composition and examine how these trajectories relate to marine protected areas and other anthropogenic drivers. This work will provide new molecular baselines and an integrated framework to support evidence-based conservation in the Coral Triangle.

01 October 2026 - 30 September 2030