A major region of biological interest are the East African great lakes, which are one of the richest freshwater ecosystems on Earth. These lakes, analogous to island systems, not only encompass staggering biodiversity, but are home to multiple endemic faunal radiations, the most celebrated being the cichlid fishes. As such these environments have received considerable attention from evolutionary biologists in providing natural experimental settings in which to study processes that underlie speciation.

Current and past projects have focused on the biodiversity hotspot Lake Tanganyika to better understand the patterns and processes underlying the generation and maintenance of its rich biodiversity  (e.g. Day & Wilkinson, 2006; Day et al. 2007, 2008; Brown et al. 2010, Peart et al. 2014, 2018).

More recently we have been interested in the impacts of land-use change on fish diversity (Britton et al. 2017, 2019) and testing the application of eDNA meta-barcoding to this challengingly diverse system for future bio-monitoring (Doble et al. 2020).