Luc Ectory Bursary Award – Maria Gabriela Junqueira
Bridging gaps in Brazilian diatoms: new species, trait variation, and a step towards building a barcode library.
Knowledge shortfalls in topics related to biodiversity, such as species taxonomy, distribution range, abiotic tolerances, functional trait variation within and between species, and species evolution, hinder a understanding patterns and processes of biodiversity. Despite recent progress, the status of diatom biodiversity in Brazil’s remains incomplete compared to North American and Europe. By implementing new methods for quantification and determining spatial and temporal patterns of diatom communities will improve the power of diatoms for assessing water quality in Brazilian aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, this project will addressing species taxonomy and functional traits. I will focus on streams and lagoons of two Brazilian biomes, the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest to address three objectives: (1) describe new diatom species to reduce the Linnean shortfall, (2) explore intraspecific variation in functional traits, and (3) establish DNA sequencing of isolated diatom cells for creating a barcode library specific to Brazilian species.
Brief Biography
Hi ! I am Maria Gabriela Junqueira. I am Ph.D. candidate in Ecology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. I started my academic journey with a degree in Biology at Universidade Estadual de Maringá (UEM). During my undergraduate program, I was lucky to work at NUPELIA (one of the pioneering research groups in Limnology in Brazil), which has as its main study site the Upper Paraná River floodplain. It was at that time when my interest in freshwater ecology and diatoms, began. In my M.S. program, I switched from studying the Upper Paraná River Floodplain to start studying high-altitude streams in southern Brazil. I completed my M.S. in Biology of Continental Aquatic Environments at Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) working with Dr. Fabiana Schneck. For that study, I investigated the role of grazers in structuring stream benthic diatom communities. As a PhD student in Ecology at UFRGS, I am working with Dr. Luciane Crossetti and co-supervised by Dr. Fabiana Schneck. My research focuses on uncovering the mechanisms behind species rarity in diatom communities. In 2023, I visited the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in collaboration with Dr. Carlos E. Wetzel, where I began describing new diatoms and learning about the DNA-metabarcoding approach. I intend to continue my research describing new species, exploring functional traits, and using the new technologies to investigate diatom communities in Brazil.