Emily Booth

Honours supervisors: Prof L Beheregaray; Dr C Brauer and Dr J Sandoval-Castillo

As a young child, I loved watching nature documentaries and learning about the vast amount of biodiversity on Earth. This passion developed into a life-long ambition to conserve species and minimise anthropogenic impacts such as climate change. I joined the Molecular Ecology Lab in 2020 to undertake an Honours project about the effect of historical aridification on the biogeography and evolution of golden perch (Macquaria ambigua). I am now undertaking a PhD in the lab, which focuses on predicting the impact of climate change on freshwater fishes in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. I plan on integrating genomic and environmental datasets to forecast ‘genomic vulnerability’ for three species with varying life-histories (golden perch, Murray River rainbowfish, and southern pygmy perch). This research will develop an understanding of which ecological traits and levels of human disturbance are likely to set populations on the path of extinction vs. persistence and help to guide the conservation of aquatic biodiversity under climate change.