Alternative monitoring methods for the endangered Grassland Earless Dragon (Tympanocryptis lineata - GED)

This scholarship will support Ryan Colley during his PhD and is being offered by the ACT government in support of his work on the endangered species Tympanocryptis lineata (Canberra Grassland Earless Dragon). In the project, Ryan will use genetic data sequenced from next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to understand the relationship between landscape and dispersal features which will help predict population dynamics over space and time. Reconstructing the spatial arrangement of kinship groups in relation to landscape features will allow me to study the shape of effective dispersal across landscapes, which in turn will allow improvements to predictions of spatial population dynamics. It is hoped that the findings from this can be used to provide a framework in the management of threatened and invasive species over a spatial scale. The proposed project will use the highly endangered Canberra Grassland Earless Dragon (Tympanocryptis lineata) as a model organism to test these predictions.