GECO is dedicated to uncovering the collective genomic properties of multi-species communities. The genomic revolution has yielded previously unimaginable benefits to human and environmental health, agricultural productivity, and biotechnology advancement. Genomic data can now be generated across large numbers of co-occurring individuals and species, leading to new insights into community structure and dynamics. Community-scale genomics can inform the maintenance of biodiversity, responses of ecological systems to environmental change and disturbance, and may yield new insights into emergent outcomes that are invisible at the scale of individuals or populations.
Recent Publications from GECO
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From Leaders of the Theme
The modern genomic revolution has yielded previously unimaginable benefits to human and environmental health, agricultural productivity, and biotechnology advancement. The advent of new sequencing technologies, in parallel with the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), now offers the opportunity to uncover the collective genomic properties of multi-species communities. Genomic data can be generated at the whole-community scale, spanning populations and ecosystems around the globe, and across the Tree of Life. By leveraging emergent technologies and methodologies, GECO is developing frameworks for realizing the untapped potential of community-scale genomic resources.
Our need to realize this vision is urgent. We stand at an inflection point of rapidly changing habitats and climate, at the precipice of dramatic future biodiversity loss. Despite this necessity, protocols for gathering, sharing, and analyzing genomic data gathered at the community scale remain ad hoc. GECO focuses on three aims: new community-scale genomic data sets; new analytical tools to make sense of those data and inform ecological understanding and forecasting; and critical advances to the digital infrastructure to support this realm of research.
