ÉGUA Ecosystem Guardians - protistan parasites as indicators of ecosystem health

The ÉGUA project will employ a combination of field sampling and advanced molecular methods to assess the diversity of apicomplexan parasites in tropical forests near Belém, Brazil. It will enhance our bioinformatics capabilities to analyse environmental sequencing data of tropical apicomplexan parasites. ÉGUA will use long-read metabarcoding to test the hypothesis that forests more heavily impacted by mining will exhibit fewer heteroxenous haemosporidians compared to monoxenous gregarines. The project will employ novel ddPCR methods to investigate the hypothesis that individual arthropods from more degraded sites will host higher abundances of monoxenous gregarines. Additionally, ÉGUA will implement cost-effective, real-time biodiversity monitoring to determine whether the protistan parasite communities identified using more intensive laboratory-based methods can also be detected through simpler field-based methods. Together, these goals will allow us to evaluate whether protistan parasites of arthropods can serve as indicators of the health of tropical forests.